The Handshake coin (HNS) is used by participants to transfer, register, and update domain names. The coin is necessary to prevent spam on the peer-to-peer network. The vast majority of the initial coin supply will be granted freely to the Free and Open Source Software community — the majority will go to individual FOSS contributors. For all non-developers, the coin is available to buy through Namebase. Users on our platform will be able to use HNS to bid on names or buy it for trading with other assets like BTC. The main utility of HNS on Namebase will always be to facilitate an easy, and private bidding experience to enable access to the new, free Internet.

Distribution

At the genesis block, there is 1.36 billion HNS with an additional 680k available to be mined, for a fully diluted supply of 2.04 billion. The first halving of the mining reward will occur after 3.25 years — after 5 years about 430k (60%) of the mineable coins will have been mined, and after around 100 years, the very last mineable HNS coin will be mined.

Developer airdrop

Of the initial 1.36 billion coins, a full 952 million HNS (70% of the initial supply, 47% of the fully diluted) airdrop is available to be claimed by:

• Anyone who had more than 15 followers on Github, and also had valid SSH+PGP keys on their GitHub account, during the week of February 4th, 2019 (roughly 170,000 accounts)

• People whose PGP keys are included in the strong set (roughly 30,000 keys)

• Hacker News accounts older than 1.5 years old with linked Keybase accounts (about 19,000 accounts)

Contributors and investors

Besides the programmatic airdrop, 7.5% of the initial supply was granted to the founding contributors and 7.5% was sold to investors in exchange for 10.2 million USD. The 15% allocation to contributors and investors went out to 1356 distinct addresses, and no single entity controls more than 1.5% of the initial supply.

FOSS

Aside from the investor and contributor allocations, significant allocations of HNS were given to pillars of the open source software community such as the Apache foundation, LibreSSL, the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, Arch Linux, etc. In addition to HNS grants, the $10.2 million raised from investors was also donated (in full!) almost immediately after it was raised, to the same set of foundations as cash grants.

More

For a much more thorough explanation of the coin emission schedule of HNS, see this community-created Reddit post.