Namecheap told customers on June 10 that Handshake domains are done. New registrations, renewals, transfers, and management of any Handshake TLD on the platform stopped immediately, with the company citing the wind-down of an upstream provider it chose not to name. Existing domains will keep resolving for now, though Namecheap gave no indication of how long that lasts.
Eleven extensions are exempt from the shutdown, including sox, saas, pgp, and creator, though Namecheap offered no explanation for why these survived while the rest did not. For everyone else, there is no migration path. The announcement asks for patience without providing anywhere to go.
This did not come out of nowhere. Namecheap sold Namebase, its Handshake marketplace, back in January. At the time, that looked like a step back rather than a full exit. Five months later, it reads more like the beginning of the end.
The deeper problem was never really about Namecheap. Handshake’s core pitch, a domain system outside ICANN‘s control, ran into the same wall every blockchain naming project has hit. Browsers do not resolve blockchain domains natively. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge all require an extension or custom DNS setup just to load a Handshake address. Email clients have the same issue. A business running a Handshake TLD for its email runs into compatibility problems with virtually every mainstream provider. That is not a marketing problem. It is a fundamental adoption ceiling.
The token tells the rest of the story. HNS peaked near $0.85 in May 2021. It now trades around $0.005, a drop of more than 99%, with a market cap sitting near $3.38 million.
Handshake is not alone here. Unstoppable Domains pivoted hard toward traditional DNS and became ICANN-accredited in 2024, with its CEO publicly admitting blockchain domains never reached mainstream usage. ENS applied for .ens as a conventional gTLD through ICANN’s current application round rather than staying outside the system entirely.
For anyone still holding Handshake domains through Namecheap, the practical advice is straightforward: domains that expire will not renew, and self-custody through a tool like Bob Wallet is the only way to keep control once Namecheap’s infrastructure changes.
