5 novel parts of Handshake’s cryptocurrency token issuance

Handshake is a decentralised naming system to conduct wide-scale co-ordination. It is powered by incentives across millions of people without authorities or contractual obligations. The handshake project aims to distribute around 70% of the coin supply to open source developers, projects and non-profits without any contractual expectation of work. Handshake has demonstrated 5 novel implementations of token issuance:

1. Worldwide coin distribution option with a trigger of $50 billion to 7 billion people

Handshake has an option to distribute the coin to 7 billion people. With the community consent, a coin distribution can occur worldwide to double the money supply via a hard fork and give that doubling to everyone in the world (7 billion people as a goal). This is only useful with sufficient value in the coin with a target of $50 billion as a trigger. This can be triggered by the aggregate value of Handshake or an aggregate value of all coins committed to worldwide distribution.

2. Free tokens to open source developers ($88.4m in tokens) — 65% of Handshake supply

The free and open source community is the principal coin owner of the project upon launch. These coins are distributed without any expectation of work. If the community is interested and Handshake becomes viable in the future, it is possible for open source software developers to integrate Handshake into their own software.

3. Donation Proof of Burn ($10.2m in tokens) — 7.5% of Handshake supply

All of the dollars raised are being given to non-profits, FOSS projects and FOSS communities such as hackerspaces. This is a one-way non-destructive “proof-of-burn” on the dollar side to price the coins. The role of coin purchasers is critical as an initial stakeholder in the growth of the project. The existence of VCs and Angel Investors is necessary in pricing the tokens, as the distribution event requires real value to be established.

4. Free tokens to strategic partners ($10.2m in tokens) — 7.5% of Handshake supply

The following corporations were offered 7.5% of all Handshake coins. There is no contractual expectation for any of these entities to help with the Handshake project in any way and is explicitly an obligation-free distribution with no strings attached.

• ICANN has been the root namespace for the internet ($3.75m in tokens) — 2.75% of supply
• ENS has developed an alternate naming root (.eth) using a decentralised Ethereum smart contract ($1.02m in tokens) — 0.75% of supply
• Namecoin is a naming blockchain ($1.02m in tokens) — 0.75% of supply
• Blockstack is a corporation developing a naming blockchain as well as decentralised internet stack ($1.02m in tokens) — 0.75% of supply
• Cloudflare is a corporation doing fundamental research for naming, caching and certificate authorities. ($680,000 in tokens) — 0.5% of supply
• Keybase has been innovating in the naming and certificate authority space ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• Verisign is the registrar for .com and .net ($680,000 in tokens) — 0.5% of supply
• Public Internet Registry maintains the .org namespace ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• Afilias is a service provider for the .org namespace ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• Brave is a browser which has crypto economic incentives ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• IdenTrust is a certificate authority ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• Comodo is a certificate authority ($340,000 in tokens) — 0.25% of supply
• Digicert is a certificate authority ($272,000 in tokens) — 0.2% of supply
• Godaddy is a certificate authority ($272,000 in tokens) — 0.2% of supply
• GMO GlobalSign is a certificate authority ($136,000 in tokens) — 0.1% of supply

5. Free tokens to users ($10.2m of tokens) — 7.5% of supply

Handshake has issued $10.2m in free tokens to users or domain name holders. These coins are provided to incentivise adoption by name holders. This creates an incentive for name registration on Handshake.

• Top Level Domains ($3.4m in tokens) — 2.5% of supply will be allocated to top level domains to be distributed evenly.
• Handshake Reserved Names ($6.8m in tokens) — 5% of supply will be allocated to the Handshake reserved names (over 80,000 names)

Handshake has made some revolutionary advances in token issuance with its Worldwide coin distribution trigger, free token distribution to open source developers, donation proof of burn, free tokens to strategic partners and free tokens to users.

Kingsley Advani is an expert on blockchain investment, featured in CNBC, Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Yahoo Finance and Entrepreneur.com. He is a Partner at Chainfund Capital, a $30m technical blockchain fund. Chainfund have made 30 investments in researcher led blockchains including Thunder, Oasis, Algorand, Zilliqa and ICON.