Handshake is a cryptocurrency that people won’t hear about in the mainstream cryptocurrency space. Joseph Poon and Andrew Lee are the two main co-founders of Handshake. Lee is known for creating one of the largest marketplaces for Bitcoin referred to as Purse. Poon has experience in the financial sector before Handshake Poon helped created the Lightning Network and Plasma.
Handshake enables involvement in a decentralized open naming platform secured by a decentralized peer-to-peer network. The platform utilizes a coin system for name registration. Handshake coin (HNS) is the native token of the platform. Through HNS, participants transfer, register and update their names on the internet.
The current Domain Name System (DNS) stack relies on a group of Certificate Authorities (CAs) that work to verify the authenticity of website ownership and prevent malicious actors from intercepting search requests. Handshake is attempting to remove the reliance on these trusted third parties by having its public Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain serve as the source of truth. Instead of registering a domain name with a CA and storing it on the root zone file, users can purchase a TLD with Handshake’s native token, HNS, and register it under their public key on the decentralized Handshake network. The relationship between public keys and TLDs on Handshake is like that of an address and a user’s UTXO account balance on Bitcoin. The Handshake software also originates from a fork of the Bitcoin client Bcoin, which was first developed by Christopher Jeffery.
The Handshake naming protocol differs from its predecessors in that it has no concept of namespacing or subdomains at the consensus layer. Its role is not to replace all of DNS, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers. HNS launched in February 2020 with a Total Supply of 2,040,000,000. Currently, the circulating supply is 542,961,267.12. ASIC miners are capable of mining HNS utilizing Proof of work principles.
Although HNS isn’t the first cryptocurrency attempting to replace the current DNS. Namecoin was established in 2011 with little success, a few years later Ethereum Name Systems was created. In the next few generations, there will be a need for a decentralized naming protocol therefore HNS can’t be ignored. I don’t suggest buying this token currently, but I do suggest mining HNS with a Goldshell miner.
