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đ¤ Intro to Handshake Protocol
One of the NFT projects weâre most excited by is Handshake (HNS).
Itâs building a vital piece of internet infrastructure for our digital future, a Web3 world which values decentralization, collective ownership, and open-source philosophy.
That piece of infrastructure is our internet naming system. When you visit facebook.com, youâre using it. When you open CoinMarketCapâs mobile app, youâre using it. When you build any piece of technology that touches the world wide web, youâre using it.
But today, that naming system is centralized, highly regulated, and controlled by a small group of companies and decision makers. And itâs incredibly valuable â after all, if Michael Saylor can sell voice.com for $30M, what do you think it would be worth if you owned .voice itself? Or if you owned .com?
What if anyone could own any word that comes after that âdotâ, whatâs known as the top level domain (the TLD)?
What if we could do it in an open and permissionless way? For any language, and for any word, and even for emojis? đ¤Ż
Thatâs what Handshake is trying to do.
It's so important that the great Satoshi himself mentioned it as a potential use case.
The value would be enormous. Internet scale enormous.

đŻ Handshake builders and investors:
3ď¸âŁ ways to participate in Handshake:
Buy a Handshake domain name with a service like Namebase or Bob Wallet
Buy the Handshake (HNS) token
Build your own Web3 linktree page
As a US citizen, weâve found Namebase to be the easiest to use, both for buying HNS, and for bidding on top level domain names. But it comes with some restrictions.
đ Additional Resources:
Handshake website: https://handshake.org
Names on the internet (top level domains, social networking handles, etc.) ultimately rely upon centralized actors with full control over a system which are relied upon to be honest, as they are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and corruption. Handshake aims to experiment with new ways the internet can be more secure, resilient, and socially useful with a peer-to-peer system validated by the network's participants.
Krakenâs beginnerâs guide: https://www.kraken.com/en-gb/learn/what-is-handshake-hns
You may not be aware, but today, website addresses are governed by a non-profit body called ICANN, which sets standards for what letter combinations can be used after the dot in any domain (such as .com, .org, .net and the many other varieties). Handshake seeks to replace ICANNâs role as central authority for creating and issuing top-level domains with an open auction system operated by its computing network. Since ICANN isnât in the picture, Handshake believes it can offer an unlimited range of top-level domains.
The Case for Handshake: https://medium.com/amentum/the-case-for-handshake-9b0af0d989fe
The idea of replacing Certificate Authorities (CAs) with a blockchain solution has been around since the early days of bitcoin. After all, the Domain Name System (DNS) is essentially a protocol for maintaining a secure, distributed list of which URLs point to which IP addresses. And what is a blockchain but a more-secure, distributed way of maintaining a linked list?
Learn HNS: https://learnhns.com
Explaining Handshake and $HNS Economics (video):
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