The Happening Event for Handshake (HNS)

The Happening event, which will take place by early February 2024, will be a gold rush for investors and builders. What is The Happening?

The Happening event, which will take place by early February 2024, will be a gold rush for investors and builders. What is The Happening?

With the launch of Handshake (HNS) on February 3rd, 2020, there were a few groups of names that were pre-reserved, namely 1) existing ICANN TLDs (eg. .com for Verisign), 2) Custom List (eg. .eth for ENS), and 3) the Alexa Top 100K. Without any interference, these reserved lists were set to expire 4 years after the launch date. As of this publication, more than 6K reserved names have been claimed by their rightful traditional domain owner, including several ICANN TLDs (eg. .ink). Since there are still many ICANN TLDs and major institutions (eg. .cloudflare) that need to claim, the HNS community proposed a soft fork that extends and modifies the reserved list to include ICANN TLDs and the updated Alexa Top 10K. In September 2023, the major HNS mining pools signaled for the soft fork to activate, thus it’s officially happening! In essence, 78,489 names will become available for auction at block 210240, around January 31st to February 3rd 2024, for the first time! This will be a huge opportunity for newcomers. 

As there’s no official marketing department for Handshake (HNS), we are coining this important event as The Happening. This is a spinoff of the halvening (or halving), which is a term used to describe the event when a POW chain (Bitcoin, Handshake, etc.) has their coin emissions daily issuance cut in half. Handshake is unique with this event where thousands of names will expire and become available for auction. As many of these virgin names are premium (think: common words or 2-3L’s), this offers newcomers equal footing to get in early on a protocol that aims to become the base of the decentralized web.

Total Minted HNS Names

HNS has the most blockchain/web3 domains by far and it’s not even close. As of November 2023, around 12 million HNS domains have been minted into existence through a decentralized Vickrey auction (learn more here). 

Credit to The Shake: theshake.xyz on DNS or theshake/ on HNS

What is a Name Worth?

With so many names, you may be asking, “what are they worth?” While many of the existing names have little market value in our opinion, the early years of HNS have shown high valuations for premium names. For example, Namecheap’s Founder and CEO, Richard Kirkendall, purchased the .S/ HNS top level domain in 2022 for $750,000 due to the utility and potential. As of 2023, this is the highest web3 domain sale ever. At NamesCon 2022, which is the largest domain conference in the world, .E/ sold for $300,000; this eclipsed the highest sale of a legacy domain auction the day prior (NamesCon 2022 Recap here). To get an idea of other past sales, Namebase is a HNS marketplace and has stats of their platform. While HNS is still in it’s infancy and has risk, our view is that this is similar to investing in .com domains back in the 90’s.

Upcoming Available HNS Names

Opening auctions for these names will become possible around February 3rd, 2024. See a full list here.

Quick Primer on Handshake (HNS)

For those unfamiliar with Handshake, here are two articles for recommended reading: 1) On Handshake and 2) Everything you didn’t know about the Handshake Naming System. Even with the dozens of blockchain domain offerings out there today, there’s still nothing quite like Handshake (HNS). Handshake’s attributes are different, with the main being a decentralized open root zone, and the capability to resolve HNS names in a secure and trustless manner through the leveraging of DANE and DNSSEC. 

HNS is secured and decentralized through a POW blockchain, and has a similar ethos to Bitcoin. While Bitcoin represents the freedom of money, Handshake represents the freedom of speech and communication. Truthfully, most other domain offerings involve centralized entities as the gatekeeper, whether that is Unstoppable Domains or another fly by night project. While some may be well-intentioned, the truth is their main goal is to make money by selling customers a product. With Handshake, no individual or entity controls the protocol, but everyone is welcome to contribute. There’s no one at the top with HNS. Most web3/blockchain/crypto/NFT projects still make the err of having a hierarchical structure, whereas Handshake consists of an organic, grassroots, self-sovereign community. By owning a HNS top level domain (think: .TX or .YourBusiness), everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute and build on top of the protocol without permission. For HNS, one is a community member. For the rest, one is primarily a customer.

HNS Coin - Another Opportunity?

In order to obtain names, HNS coin is required to interact with the Handshake blockchain. HNS coin can be used to open new auctions, bid on names, update DNS records, and renew names every two years. In other words, HNS coin has massive utility as the fuel of the decentralized web, with the potential to one day be the summation of all value accrued therein.

There should be an increase in acquiring HNS coin as we get closer to The Happening date, so it may be a good idea to accumulate beforehand. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca once said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Lastly, as the proceeds from a decentralized Vickery auction do not go into the pockets of an entity or DAO, burning the HNS coin will continue to make it scarcer. 

While the total possible supply was set to 2,040,000,000 hns (Handshake Design Notes), the reality is that circulating coins currently are - and likely will end up - nowhere close to this number. This is because 952,000,000 hns of the total coin supply was designated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Developers, most of which remains unclaimed (and likely will stay unclaimed). Along with the reserved names set to expire, the claimable 500 - 25,000,000 hns attached to each of these reserved names will effectively be burned from the supply forever. In essence, this soft fork will remove close to 2% of the max supply. As 35 million hns have been burned through auctions as of late 2023, the design mechanics results in a deflationary currency over the long-term. With that being said, the actual max supply could be somewhere in the 1-1.3 billion range. This is important when considering the value of the network as a whole and what the base layer of the decentralized web is worth.

With the soft fork locked in, the Handshake network is on the cusp of experiencing both a supply shock (reduction in coin supply) while simultaneously seeing a demand shock (user demand for premium names/TLDs becoming available for the first time). It's exciting times in the Handshake ecosystem.

Closing

If you’re reading this now, it’s still early to get into Handshake. All are welcome to join and contribute, but no one owns the protocol itself. It’s only a matter of time before it's realized that HNS is the way to an open and free decentralized web, enabling true creativity and self-expression. With The Happening upcoming, this is arguably one of the most important events that was baked into the protocol from the launch. As Handshake is a project with a decades-long vision, it may make sense to get a few premium HNS names and HNS coin. If enough people believe that Handshake (HNS) will become the base of the decentralized web, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Author: Nole Oppermann, Founder of Hey TX
Originally published: August 1st, 2023. Updated: November 17th, 2023
Disclaimer: This article is intended to be for informational purposes only, and should not be considered investment advice.