Halving Complete
April Updates: HNS Halving, Stems Social, Namebase Withdrawals, and ICANN Proposal
HNS Supply
Handshake’s supply-side tokenomics were on full display this week. On April 28, Handshake successfully completed its first halving at block 170,000. Mining rewards have now been reduced from 2000 HNS to 1000 HNS per block.
At the same time, HNS experienced a second supply shock as the recent .web3 auction finalized. The winning amount of 673k HNS has been officially burned — adding over 2% to the total burn amount in a single day.
Open Roots, New Stems, Bluer Skies
Stems Social is a new project from The Shake — an experimental Bluesky server supporting Handshake domains as handles. Our goal is to explore pairing sovereign and secure identities with an open social protocol. You can read more about the approach and architecture here.
This week, we will begin rolling out a new invite system to join the server. Stay tuned for more info.
Namebase enables HNS Withdrawals
Namebase now enables US customers to withdraw HNS to self-hosted wallets. Users can move coins to Bob Wallet or FxWallet for self custody. As a primary onramp to obtain HNS, Namebase withdrawals unlock significant liquidity in the Handshake ecosystem. HNS-based payments and services become more feasible.
Further Namebase updates include a revamped Auctions page, an increase in the minimum auction lockup amount (10 HNS), and an upcoming Transfers dashboard.
ICANN Proposal Would Allow Government Seizures of Domains
Illustrating the case for Handshake and a neutral root zone, a new ICANN and Verisign proposal would let any government seize domain names, overturning two decades of global domain name policy.
While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal…
This proposal represents a complete government takeover of domain names, with no due process protections for registrants. It would usurp the role of registrars, making governments go directly to Verisign (or any other registry that adopts similar language) to achieve anything they desired.
Explore The Shake’s website for more news, data, and resources across Handshake and the Decentralized Web.