While most of the news in the crypto world today is dominated by BTC, ETH, and lately Doge, HNS has been busy growing like crazy in the background. If HNS was a person I’d like to think of them as a cool cat, someone who isn’t looking for a lot of attention, humble, but doing big things.
If you haven’t been looking at the HNS chart, here’s a look at how its been performing this year:
HNS started 2021 at around $0.10 and now it’s over $0.8 – for those keeping score that’s a 700% increase so far this year. What makes this growth extra special is that HNS has grown because of the utility people around the world see in Handshake and all the amazing people building the community it has today.
Now before I go any further I’ll make a point that is so critical when it comes to Handshake. I’ve said this a few times before but it’s important to say it again – what makes Handshake domains very different from traditional domains is that they are being used as TLDs. So many domains that would make a ton of sense in .COM don’t make any sense at all in the Handshake domain world because they wouldn’t work as a TLD.
Just look at the new gTLD program. We have around 2,000 new gTLDs and only a tiny fraction of them have taken off, and that’s with full support from every browser on the planet. Just like the new gTLDs, I do believe some Handshake domains will take off, single letter domains like c/ and p/ – yes, those could work because people may want to buy something.c or something.p. But take something like Horse.com that’s a solid .COM name and compare it to .Horse, and well, you get the picture.
Now let’s talk about what’s already happened. A ton of Handshake domains have already been taken and good ones that are listed for sale are often listed at astronomically high prices. Here are some examples:
For those of you who can’t multiply huge numbers by .8, I’ll help – ukraine/ is listed for $880,000,000 – yes that’s 880M USD. Could you imagine owning Ukraine.com and thinking it would make sense to list it for $880M?
Of course, I’m sharing some pretty extreme examples, not all Handshake domains are priced in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There are plenty of domains priced in the four and five-figure range, but I’ll be honest, the vast majority of the ones I’ve seen don’t make sense as a TLD. Sure, if it was that word in a .COM, it would be worth plenty, but not as a TLD.
Also just to be clear, this doesn’t mean I don’t think Handshake is going to be a huge success, I think it is. I’m super impressed with the community they’re building and I think we’ll all have a website on a Handshake domain some day, I’m just not sure we’ll all own a portfolio of valuable Handshake domains. The good news is, that’s okay – Handshake can grow and do wonderful things without a huge investor community, the real winners will be the Verisigns of the Handshake world, the people who own the Handshake domains (i.e. TLDs) that take off. And the really good news, or at least the hope is, these won’t be big corporations with shareholders and highly paid execs, it will be normal people trying to build a better Internet.
The more I dive into the world of buying Handshake domains, and the more I watch HNS, the more I feel like my money is better spent buying HNS itself and maybe getting something like morgan.c/ or similar if Handshake takes off. At least that’s how I’m thinking about things now, it could change, but it’s hard for me to see most of these domains as a great fit when they’re used as a TLD, but maybe that’s just me.
What do you think? Comment and let your voice be heard!
Disclosure: I am an investor in Handshake.
