$HNS
🧠 ICANN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT DNS™: The Rise and Fall of Handshake Domains ($HNS)
When a noble attempt to free the internet became a decentralized cosplay convention for wannabe registrars.
Once upon a blockchain, in the golden era of "Web3 Will Fix This," a plucky little protocol named Handshake (HNS) swaggered onto the stage with a manifesto:
“Down with ICANN! Long live decentralization!”
Their mission?
To pry control of the Domain Name System (DNS) out of the cold, bureaucratic claws of ICANN and deliver it into the warm, grubby hands of the community.
What happened instead?
A cryptographically-signed Lord of the Flies.
🌐 The Problem with ICANN (and the Dream of HNS)
ICANN — the benevolent dictator of domain names — has been gatekeeping the internet since the dial-up days.
Decisions are made behind closed doors. Bidding wars for TLDs like .app, .xyz, and .whoevenuses.net are resolved with more backroom deals than a Marvel villain origin story.
So when HNS proposed a "decentralized alternative root zone" using blockchain and public-key cryptography to allow anyone to own and manage their own TLDs, the open web cheered.
“Finally, a domain name system for the people!” – People who were already running full Bitcoin nodes and compiling Go code from scratch.
🏗️ But There’s Just One Problem… or a Dozen
1. 🧱 It’s not the DNS you know.
Despite mimicking the architecture of DNS, Handshake isn’t actually compatible with the global Internet Domain Name System as defined by IANA.
Sure, you can buy .uncle or .moon on HNS.
But unless you:
- Run a full recursive resolver,
- Install a sketchy browser extension,
- Or use a gateway service that may or may not be up next week,
...your domain exists in the Phantom Zone.
2. 🧟 It’s opt-in DNS. Which means: It’s not DNS.
The moment you have to tell someone,
“No no, open Chrome, but also install this extension first and point it to my alternate root server,” you've lost 99% of humanity and 100% of commercial relevance.
Try getting Let’s Encrypt, Cloudflare, or Google Public DNS to validate your .snekcoin domain.
They won’t.
Because as far as the actual DNS root is concerned, your Handshake TLD is just a nice hallucination.
🐳 And Then Came the Whales
The HNS auction system was supposed to be fair, open, and honest.
Instead, it quickly turned into the Y Combinator Hunger Games.
Whales sat quietly until the final hour of auctions, sniping promising names with deep wallets and automated bots.
Squatting became the primary business model.
The decentralized dream?
Reduced to hundreds of mini-ICANNs, each hoarding TLDs and charging rent.
One can only watch so many .defi, .wallet, and .hodl scams go up for sale before wondering if maybe centralization wasn't the worst thing ever.
🔐 The PKI Problem
Let’s Encrypt? Nope.
ACME? N/A.
DNSSEC? Hahaha.
You see, the moment you diverge from the official IANA root, you’re no longer in the same DNS universe.
Which means existing security infrastructure doesn’t trust you.
Your HNS domain can’t get a certificate from any respected CA, because you don’t exist in their chain of trust.
And good luck arguing semantic technicalities in RFCs while your user’s browser screams “INSECURE SITE” like it's a DEFCON drill.
⛓️ HNS Fork Drama and the $HNS Dump
And then, the vibes soured.
With murmurs of a hard fork on the horizon and one of the top registrars dumping their $HNS stash harder than VCs at a rug-pull party, the writing was on the wall.
The developers did what every noble project eventually does when the ideology buckles under market pressure:
They wrote goodbye posts.
“I just sent my last 25,000 HNS to the top contributors. I learned a lot. Thank you.” – A cryptobro, right before installing a .eth wallet.
🧪 Lessons Learned from the Experiment
Handshake was bold.
Ambitious.
Built by idealists who believed DNS could be liberated by cryptography and fairness.
But instead of decentralization solving the problems of ICANN, it just recreated them without the guardrails:
- Power consolidation in whales,
- Incompatibility with the existing internet,
- A lack of incentive for adoption by major players,
- And protocols that felt like ICANN LARPing on the blockchain.
🔮 So What’s Next?
If we ever do get a proper alternative DNS system:
- It’ll need native OS/browser support.
- It’ll need anti-squatting mechanisms like usage requirements or squatter fees.
- It’ll need trustless compatibility with modern internet security.
- And most importantly, it’ll need to NOT feel like you're debugging
bind9in 2002 just to access a cat website.
Handshake walked so some future project might run.
Or maybe it just tripped over its own protocol and faceplanted into a memecoin grave.
Either way:
ICANN still stands.
And you still can’t buy .moonwallet without installing a Chrome extension made by someone named 0x69H4ckerBoi.
🪦 Handshake: Decentralized, Disconnected, and Discontinued.
