Our Network: Issue #60 (Part 2)
Coverage on Handshake, Numerai, Chainlink, The Graph, and Arweave.
Continued from Part 1.
⑤ Handshake
👥 Steven D. McKie
📈 The Name Economy has shaken up
👉 Join the community Telegram, ✏️ Learn HNS
Handshake qualitatively and quantitatively has made many strides since our last update. The number of opened TLDs (or NFTLDs) on the network have increased immensely, now with over 638,000+ names open for auction to date; the $HNS price has seen a ~150% rise, driven to over $0.30+ in the last month as it enters price discovery. To put this into real-world perspective, there are only about 1,514 in the ICANN DNS namespace active today. Handshake is economically, and now extendably, a more robust namespace, with embedded incentives over the legacy system. Time is now the only factor standing between Handshake and long-term success. On February 3rd of 2021, HNS celebrated the 1 year anniversary of its formal launch; and February 14th, 2021 was the anniversary of the 2016th block, which marked the beginning of Handshake’s name bidding and transactions following its consensus aware slow-roll launch.
As Namebase.io permeates the Handshake ecosystem as the sole Handshake exchange and name registrar, their recently launched secondary marketplace has also seen impressive month-over-month growth and remains unchallenged. With February having already exceeded 1.6 million+ HNS in name sale volume as of the 21st, with 7 days remaining in the month. With the increase in demand for names already registered, the secondary market resale value of HNS will continue to explode as new markets emerge and price discovery of these non-fungible name assets expands.
The on-chain network activity of HNS remains healthy and constantly growing as well. We’ve exceeded 3 million + transactions now to date, with monthly bid volumes for HNS exceeding over 25million+ in January alone. Bids per day for HNS names (transactions calling the BID covenant function to update their namestate during a name auction) continue at a steady pace of around 7-10k daily. The process of buying a Handshake name is a 2nd price Vickrey auction, and is gamified to the point where merely buying a name is an enjoyable experience; and a massive community has arisen to enjoy, and profit seek, together because of it. Internet domains are the first real digital non-fungible asset, so it comes as no surprise that domainers and internet savvy folks have rallied so quickly behind HNS in its first year.
With registered names on the network approaching, and soon surpassing over 600,000+, HNS is being utilized exactly as it was meant to be. We’ve seen parabolic growth in the usage of resolvable names on-chain as well, as education and outreach catches up with the community-made resources and infrastructure since Handshake’s launch.
And finally, as with any healthy and spry public blockchain, our mining ecosystem maintains a full bill of health as well. Mining difficulty has soared and surpassed over 1 billion in network difficulty. With the combined network hashrate reaching nearly 8 petahashes, we’ve seen roughly a 100% growth since our last update. HNS is now producing nearly $100k+ daily in block rewards, surpassing the daily security of chains almost 2-7x its marketcap. If price follows security, and the Handshake ecosystem continues this parabolic growth pattern with its core use case, what may emerge could be one of the most impressive creations of wealth we’ve seen in crypto thus far as the New Internet finally emerges right in front of us. The DWeb is ripe for innovation, and we stand at the precipice of sweeping change.
