Post-Update on “The Happening”

As expected, The Happening soft fork has been wild! So much energy and excitement. All time high bidding with $hns. In short: The HNS chain and community are thriving.

As expected, The Happening soft fork has been wild! So much energy and excitement. All time high bidding with $hns. In short: The HNS chain and community are thriving.

1. Handshake completed it’s first soft fork on February 3rd, 2024. Around 73K HNS domains became available for the first time. This soft fork was entirely community-led. Around 11k domains remain reserved for the Alexa Top 10K (eg. .Coinbase/) and existing ICANN TLDs (eg. .com). Overall, this changes the economics and incentives, which will encourage further adoption of HNS.

   1. Here’s a hype video that Hey TX made to celebrate The Happening. The soft fork commenced on block 210240.

2. Chain Activity: As of February 10th, more than 83 million $hns has been locked up in auctions so far this month, accounting for around 15% of the circulating supply. On February 8th, there was 25k bids placed. On February 10th, there was 39k bids, a record for a single day. All of these stats are all time highs, demonstrating that the HNS blockchain and community are in an upward trajectory. In February 2024, an estimated 1.5-2% of the circulating supply will be burned due to the winner’s coin proceeds being burned from the coin supply. Example: .India/ sold for 1,581,947 hns coin (around 65K USD)! Since Handshake’s launch in February 2020, 6 out of the top 10 decentralized auctions on the HNS protocol occurred in early February 2024.

   1. Stats Resources: https://hns.cymon.de/stats and https://www.namebase.io/stats/

      

   

   The names highlighted in green were auctioned in February 2024.

3. Trading volume: Since February 1st, 24-hour trading volume has ranged from 100K to 600K USD. All trading is organic; the HNS community has no market makers. The coin has real utility in acquiring hns names (decentralized domains / identities) and being the fuel for the base of the decentralized web (Handshake).

   1. As the HNS protocol is truly decentralized and community-led (there's no centralized company, foundation, or DAO), it’s only a matter of time before major exchanges start listing hns. HNS is one of the few coins that exchanges don’t have to worry about being a security.

4. Hey TX acquired .Texas; this was the utmost priority for us. .Texas was previously reserved for Texas.gov from February 3rd 2020 to February 3rd 2024. The Hey TX team provided testimony at the Texas State Capitol on two occasions over the years, and look forward to collaborating with the State of Texas in the future.

   1. While .TX is intended for commercial use and decentralized identity, .Texas can be used for experimentation, internal government portals for increased security, public facing government websites, and more.

      

What’s Upcoming for HNS

1. MASQ Browser - browser integration for HNS names.

   1. MASQ’s X Announcement

      

   2. MASQ x Handshake community call with Handshake co-creator, Andrew Lee

   3. Aspirational goal: 'Stateless DANE' implementation for HNS

      1. Resolving HNS sites in a secure and trustless manner through a light client DANE implementation.

   4. MASQ will utilize .masq for wallet naming

2. Carbon Browser - browser integration for HNS names. 

   1. Carbon’s X Announcement

      

   2. Carbon will utilize .csix for wallet naming, powered by Superlink.

   

3. HandyCon 2024 - the 4th Handshake Conference.

   

4. Spaceship - next-generation domain registrar 

5. Thunderbolt - P2P communication through DNS; built by Spaceship

   1. Available in Apple Store (Android coming soon)

   2. Here’s a one-minute explanation of Thunderbolt, which I shared during a I❤️Domains interview in December 2023.

   3. In September 2023, I became the first to publicly discuss Thunderbolt at a Hey TX meetup in Austin, TX.

   4. Note: this app is in beta, thus bugs are a possibility.

Make calls using your domain names with Thunderbolt.

Closing

While the world may appear like it’s heading down a path of the dystopian 1984 novel, freedom enhancing technologies like Handshake (HNS) and Bitcoin instill in me a strong faith of optimism. Property-rights, privacy, and the liberty to live freely without government or corporate intrusion are crucial if we are to live in a free society. HNS preserves freedom of speech and freedom to interact online, and I dare say, that’s a worthy endeavor.

For Liberty,
nole.hey