Handshake

DISAMBIGUATION (read first): The task brief assumed the source database's domain, handshake.org, was a mismatch and that Greylock's real portfolio company must be joinhandshake.com, the college recruiting/early-career jobs platform founded by Garrett Lord, Scott Ringwelski, and Ben Christensen. After directly checking Greylock Partners' own official portfolio site (greylock.com/portfolio/ and greylock.com/portfolio/handshake/) via two independent fetches, this research concludes the OPPOSITE: the source database's domain is actually correct. Greylock's own portfolio page for 'Handshake' explicitly displays website handshake.org, LinkedIn linkedin.com/company/handshakeorg, X handle @hns, category 'Domain, Consumer,' description 'Decentralized naming and certificate authority... a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems,' 'First Partnered' stage 'Series A,' status 'Active,' and investor 'Mike Duboe.' This is a strong, repeatable primary-source signal (Greylock's own site, fetched twice with identical results) that the company Greylock actually backed is the Handshake decentralized-DNS/naming PROTOCOL project, not the joinhandshake.com recruiting platform. Reinforcing this, Wikipedia's article on 'Handshake (company)' (the joinhandshake.com recruiting platform) makes no mention of Greylock anywhere in its funding history, and TechCrunch's own 'Handshake' tag page confirms there are at least FOUR unrelated companies that have used the name 'Handshake': (1) joinhandshake.com, the recruiting platform; (2) handshake.org, the decentralized naming/DNS protocol; (3) a B2B wholesale e-commerce ordering app (YC-backed, acquired by Shopify in May 2019); and (4) an unrelated 'personal data marketplace' startup from 2013. This name collision is almost certainly the source of the ambiguity in the source database. CONFIDENCE LEVEL: HIGH that Greylock's actual portfolio investment, and therefore the correct subject of this profile, is handshake.org (the decentralized naming protocol) -- this is asserted directly and repeatedly by Greylock's own website. MODERATE-LOW confidence on the specific mechanics of that investment (exact date, round size, amount, structure), because no secondary/independent source (CoinDesk, TechCrunch, Crunchbase attempts, Wikipedia) explicitly names Greylock or Mike Duboe among Handshake's investors; Crunchbase profile URLs for 'Handshake org/dns/hns' variants all returned 404s in this session, and general web search was unavailable for most of this research due to session quota exhaustion, so it is possible additional corroborating coverage exists that could not be located here. All of the substantive business/product/team research below concerns handshake.org, the protocol, per this disambiguation.

HANDSHAKE THE PROTOCOL: Handshake is an experimental, decentralized alternative to the traditional Domain Name System (DNS) and Certificate Authority (CA) model. Rather than a central body like ICANN governing top-level domains, Handshake implements a permissionless, blockchain-based root zone: anyone can bid on and win top-level domain names via on-chain auctions using the protocol's native cryptocurrency, HNS, and the resulting ownership records are validated collectively by network peers rather than by a central registry. The protocol was first publicly revealed on August 2, 2018 (per CoinDesk's 'Handshake Revealed: VCs Back Plan to Give Away $100 Million in Crypto'), which described a plan in which the project's founders/backers would reserve 7.5% of the total HNS token supply for themselves (raising roughly $10.2 million from a group of about 67 investors and funds, implying a roughly $136 million valuation for that stake) while giving away the other ~85% of tokens (worth roughly $115 million at the time) for free to a broad community of open-source contributors, including GitHub users, the P2P Foundation, Freenode IRC users, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tor Foundation, and the top ~80,000 existing website domain owners (via cryptographic proof of ownership). Named backers in that CoinDesk coverage were a16z crypto, Founders Fund, Polychain Capital, and Draper Associates; the majority of the ~67 backers were not individually named in that article, leaving open the possibility Greylock/Mike Duboe was among them. The three individuals named as key founders/creators of the project in that same coverage were Joseph Poon (co-creator of the Bitcoin Lightning Network), Andrew Lee (CEO of Purse.io and founder of Private Internet Access), and Christopher 'J.J.' Jeffrey (CTO; well-known Bitcoin developer and author of the 'bcoin' alternative full-node implementation).

LAUNCH AND DEVELOPMENT: Handshake's mainnet launched on February 3-4, 2020 (CoinDesk, 'Handshake's Uncensorable Web Domains Go Live on Mainnet'). Around the same time, Namebase -- a separate, VC-backed company led by CEO Tieshun Roquerre -- emerged as the leading registrar and exchange for Handshake (.hns) domain names, and Roquerre became one of the protocol's most visible public spokespeople (he is referred to as a 'Handshake founder' in some later CoinDesk coverage, though earlier 2018 coverage attributes protocol founding specifically to Poon, Lee, and Jeffrey -- a naming ambiguity likely reflecting Roquerre's central role in commercializing/popularizing the ecosystem via Namebase rather than in authoring the original protocol). In June 2020, the ecosystem launched an experimental browser (referred to in CoinDesk's tagging system as 'Handybrowser') intended to let users resolve and browse Handshake-based domains without centralized DNS lookups. By late May 2020, CoinDesk reported the Namebase exchange had seen $10 million in cumulative HNS token trades. In January 2021, the pirated-academic-paper site Sci-Hub briefly registered a Handshake domain after being banned from Twitter, with Namebase proactively facilitating access, but Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan abandoned the domain after only two days, publicly criticizing the arrangement for still requiring centralized 'custodianship' via Namebase for true subdomain control -- an episode that exposed real limitations in how decentralized the protocol's practical, everyday use actually was; Roquerre acknowledged that true independent subdomain ownership 'requires a lot more engineering work' and was not yet implemented. In March-April 2021, developer Matthew Zipkin (a former BitGo engineer and bcoin contributor) discovered a critical inflation bug that could have let a malicious miner mint unlimited extra HNS; Joseph Poon and Christopher Jeffrey led a coordinated, confidential fix with major mining pools (F2Pool, Poolin) and executed an emergency soft fork before public disclosure. The bug was never exploited and no funds were lost.

Business model

Handshake is an open-source, permissionless protocol rather than a conventional operating company; it has no central corporate entity that generates revenue from the protocol itself. Commercial activity occurs in the ecosystem layer, primarily through third-party businesses (most notably Namebase, a registrar/exchange for Handshake .hns domain names) that monetize domain registration, auction participation, and trading of the HNS token and TLDs.