Unstoppable and private

Handshake ensures DNS records can only be modified by a domain’s owner

Malicious actors spy on and tamper with end-users browsing activity. DNS providers, including ISPs, collect and sell end-user data to advertisers. As a workaround, people resort to VPNs and centralized resolvers like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 which can be shut down at any time (and still require trusting the resolvers themselves).

Privacy

When using traditional domains and registrars, domain owners have the option to pay for different levels of privacy. These options are priced based on a yearly fee that ranges between $9.99 - $20/yr. However, most of these products don’t entirely protect the owner's identity. Solicitors can source the domain owners contact information using WHOIS lookups and other affiliate databases, and the ownership data is also stored in centralized databases, subject to government requests. In the US, registrants have to submit WHOIS information, and in China, they need to complete real name verification. This makes it difficult for people to create politically sensitive websites without compromising their safety.

Since privacy is a core feature of Handshake names, Namebase does not charge a yearly fee to keep ownership details private. There is no recurring annual fee or any other related fees to keep your information away from the solicitors. And there is no WHOIS lookup or any other public database where ownership or contact information is exposed.

Censorship

Even though DNS is infrastructure that the entire world relies on, only a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy control it. The centralized nature of DNS makes it trivial for governments and institutions to censor and seize domain names, who often decide to block websites and content by not allowing the recursive server to find the intended domain names. Turkish citizens were banned from wikipedia for almost 4 years and are still blocked from the encrypted email provider ProtonMail. Iran recently censored Facebook and Twitter before shutting off their Internet entirely, and recall India's recent internet shutdown. The services blocked in China are legion, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Handshake DNS data is distributed across all the nodes in its blockchain network. As long as end-users can connect to a single node in the distributed network, the end-users will be able to resolve Handshake names, making Handshake DNS very difficult to censor.