Originally published at https://monstadomains.com/blog/blockchain-domain-names/
On June 10, 2026, Namecheap pulled the plug on Handshake TLD support with no migration path for its customers. Every user who had purchased blockchain domain names through Namecheap’s Handshake service found registrations, renewals, transfers, and management functions suspended – permanently. Namecheap cited an unnamed upstream provider winding down and offered nothing further: no refunds, no recommended alternatives, no timeline. For anyone who bet on blockchain domain names as a parallel internet that would route around ICANN’s authority, that silence said everything.
Namecheap Exits Handshake With No Migration Path
The warning signs were there in retrospect. In January 2026, Namecheap sold Namebase – the Handshake name marketplace it had been operating – to undisclosed buyers. On February 1, Namebase went offline for what was described as a migration. Then on June 10, Namecheap announced it was ending all Handshake TLD services entirely. The sequence looks less like a pivot and more like a structured exit that customers were never informed of in advance.
The scale of Namecheap’s departure amplifies its significance. With tens of millions of domains under management globally, Namecheap is one of the largest registrars in the world. When an operator of that size concludes that blockchain domain names are not commercially viable to support, smaller operators take notice. This was not a technical failure. It was a market verdict delivered without ceremony.
Why Blockchain Domain Names Could Not Cross Into the Mainstream
The Browser Wall No One Could Climb
The structural problem with Handshake – and with blockchain domain names built on competing root systems generally – was never the cryptographic architecture. The problem was browser support. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge each declined to integrate native Handshake resolution. Accessing a site registered under a Handshake TLD required either a dedicated browser extension or a custom DNS resolver configured at the device level. That step is trivial for a developer and invisible to everyone else – which is precisely why it functioned as a hard ceiling on adoption.
Censorship-Resistant in Theory, Unreachable in Practice
The privacy case for blockchain domain names is genuine. On-chain ownership means no registrar can be pressured into transferring or suspending your domain. No court order delivered to a centralised hosting company erases a Handshake registration from the chain. For journalists, activists, and operators working in hostile legal environments, those guarantees matter. But censorship resistance only has value if people can actually visit your site. A domain that requires custom setup to resolve in a standard browser is not resistant to censorship – it is already inaccessible to most of the internet.
The HNS Token Is Down 99 Percent and the Market Has Decided
The financial data behind Handshake’s retreat is unambiguous. According to reporting by webhosting.today, the HNS token peaked at $0.85 in May 2021. As of June 2026, it trades at $0.005 – a 99 percent decline from peak. The Handshake network’s total market cap sits at approximately $3.38 million, a figure smaller than most seed-stage software companies. For a protocol that once framed blockchain domain names as a wholesale replacement for the ICANN-governed root zone, the collapse in speculative confidence is total.
Token price alone does not determine a network’s utility – but commercial infrastructure follows capital. At a $3.38 million market cap, there is no realistic incentive for major registrars to bear the cost of maintaining Handshake integrations. Namecheap’s exit reflects that arithmetic. The decision was not made in isolation; it was the natural outcome of a market that had already priced in the result.
Unstoppable Domains Calls Blockchain Domain Names a Craze
The retreat extends beyond Handshake. In March 2026, Unstoppable Domains CEO Matthew Gould acknowledged publicly that blockchain domain names had represented a temporary “craze” with limited mainstream penetration. The admission came from the organisation that had done more than any other to market the concept: over four million blockchain domain names sold, $70 million in venture funding raised. At the time of Gould’s statement, traditional DNS services accounted for more than 90 percent of Unstoppable’s active business. The company had become, by its own admission, primarily a conventional registrar that also sells NFT-backed names.
That shift reflects an honest reckoning with where blockchain domain names found their actual market. As a crypto-native utility for replacing wallet addresses with human-readable identifiers, ENS and Unstoppable continue to process real transaction volume. As a general-purpose naming system to replace .com and .org for the broader internet, blockchain domain names never found an audience outside the community already deep in cryptocurrency.
ENS Applied to ICANN Rather Than Staying Outside It
Perhaps the most revealing development of 2026 came from Ethereum Name Service. Rather than continue operating as a challenger to the traditional DNS root, ENS applied for .ens through ICANN’s 2026 gTLD application round. The application frames ENS as an extension of the existing DNS rather than a replacement for it. For a protocol built on the logic of decentralization and independence from institutional frameworks, applying to the institution your protocol was designed to circumvent is a significant move. ENS did not concede defeat – it recalibrated. But the direction of travel says something important about where blockchain domain names stand relative to traditional internet infrastructure.
Blockchain Domain Names and the ICANN Namespace Collision Problem
There is a structural problem that blockchain domain names introduced by expanding outside ICANN’s framework without coordination. When Handshake, Unstoppable Domains, and others began issuing extensions like .wallet, .crypto, and .nft in earlier years, they did so unilaterally – assuming those strings would remain safely outside ICANN’s jurisdiction. The 2026 gTLD application round has made that assumption untenable. New applicants are now seeking ICANN delegation of strings that blockchain registries already sold to paying customers.
ICANN’s current procedures have no mechanism for assessing collision risk with pre-existing on-chain registrations – a gap noted in a public comment to ICANN’s Name Collision Procedure review in early 2026. If ICANN delegates .wallet to a traditional registry, two separate authorities will govern the same string simultaneously. Blockchain domain names registered under affected extensions may stop resolving correctly as ICANN-governed versions go live. The blockchain naming ecosystem invented those extensions. There is no recourse when the conventional system later delegates them to someone else.
What to Do If You Hold Handshake or Blockchain Domain Names
If you were a Namecheap customer holding Handshake domains, your registrations remain on the Handshake blockchain. They have not been deleted. But without major registrar infrastructure behind them, resolution now depends on running an independent node or using specialist Handshake resolver services – options that are narrowing as commercial interest retreats. Document your holdings, identify which services still offer active Handshake support, and evaluate whether maintaining those names is worth the ongoing operational overhead going forward.
If you hold blockchain domain names under extensions now in active contention with ICANN applicants – .wallet, .crypto, .nft and similar strings – monitor ICANN’s 2026 delegation decisions closely. Collisions will not affect every blockchain domain name equally, but specific extensions where on-chain registrations overlap with incoming ICANN delegations carry real resolution risk. Understanding which side of that line your domains fall on before delegations go live is the only meaningful preparation available right now.
For those who turned to blockchain domain names primarily for privacy – to avoid handing personal data to a registrar and keep payment methods untraceable – the practical alternative is more reliable than it might sound. You can register a domain privately without identity verification, backed by full WHOIS privacy protection, and pay with cryptocurrency. If Monero is your preferred method for maximum payment anonymity, it helps to first understand how Monero domain payments work in practice before you start.
The Takeaway
Namecheap’s exit from Handshake is not an isolated event. It is the most concrete signal yet that the first generation of blockchain domain names failed to achieve the scale its supporters projected. The HNS token is down 99 percent. Unstoppable Domains publicly called the era a craze. ENS moved inside the ICANN framework rather than outside it. Customers who held Handshake names through Namecheap were left without a migration path. Taken together, these are not isolated setbacks – they are a coordinated retreat from a vision the market tested and declined at scale.
The impulse behind blockchain domain names – to register and operate online without being identified, tracked, or tied to traceable payments – remains completely valid. The technology did not deliver it in a form the mainstream internet would support. MonstaDomains lets you register a domain privately with crypto and zero identity requirements, through infrastructure that resolves in every browser without extensions or custom DNS configurations.
