How to renew Handshake names (and what happens if you don't)

Handshake names expire 105,120 blocks — about two years — after their last renewal. What the RENEW transaction does, and what happens if the window passes.

5 August 2026 · 6 min read

A Handshake name is not rented from a registrar, so nobody sends you an invoice. It is also not permanent. Every registered name carries an expiry height in the chain’s own name state, and if the chain passes that height without seeing a RENEW transaction from you, the name stops being yours.

This post is the mechanics: where the deadline comes from, what renewing actually costs, what you lose if you miss it, and how a wallet can put the deadline somewhere you’ll see it.

The deadline is a block height, not a date

The renewal window on Handshake mainnet is 105,120 blocks. A name’s expiry height is:

expiry = the name’s last renewal height + 105,120

The “last renewal height” is set when the name is first registered, and reset every time a RENEW confirms. At Handshake’s 10-minute target block spacing — 144 blocks per day — 105,120 blocks works out to 730 days, which is where the “names renew every two years” shorthand comes from.

That shorthand is useful and slightly wrong in a way worth knowing. Consensus counts blocks, not days. If blocks come in faster than 10 minutes on average (the usual case when hashrate is rising), your name expires earlier in calendar terms than a naive two-year estimate suggests. Any date a wallet shows you — including ours — is an estimate derived from block height. The height is the deadline; the date is a forecast.

You can always check the height yourself: the name’s renewal field in the name state, plus 105,120, against the current chain tip.

What a RENEW transaction actually does

Renewing is a covenant transaction that spends the coin holding your name and creates a new output carrying a RENEW covenant. Three things about it surprise people:

It pays you. The RENEW output pays the same value back to the same address the name coin was already on. This isn’t a stylistic choice, it’s consensus: hsd’s covenant rules require the addresses to match for RENEW (as they do for UPDATE and TRANSFER). Paying a fresh address — even one of your own — produces a transaction that every node rejects as invalid. Nothing moves. You are re-signing your claim, not paying anyone.

It costs a network fee and nothing else. There is no renewal price, no registrar margin, no annual rate that can be raised. You pay miners to include a small transaction. That’s the whole bill.

It commits a recent block hash. The RENEW covenant carries the hash of a block from the recent past — in our implementation, the block at tip minus 8,640 (twice hsd’s 4,320-block renewal maturity), deep enough to be safe from reorgs. This ties the renewal to real, recent chain history, so renewals can’t be signed years ahead of time and banked. It also means an offline wallet can’t renew: you need a current view of the chain to build a valid RENEW.

You can renew as early as you like. Each RENEW resets the window from the block it confirms in, so renewing at 18 months doesn’t waste six months — it starts a fresh 105,120 from that point. Renewing early is the cheap, boring, correct move.

What happens if the window passes

At the expiry height, the name’s state is cleared. Concretely:

It stops being yours. The chain no longer records you as the owner.
Your DNS records stop being served. Anything resolving through that name — a site, a wallet address, a mail record — goes dark for everyone using a Handshake resolver.
The name goes back in the pool. Anyone can send an OPEN for it and start a fresh auction. You can bid in that auction, but you bid as a stranger. There is no right of first refusal, no grace period you can pay to use, no support queue, and nobody with the authority to give it back to you. That authority doesn’t exist in the protocol — which is the same property that makes the name genuinely yours while you hold it.
Assume the HNS locked in the name is gone too. The value locked in a name coin is spendable only through covenants that require you to be the current owner, so once the name state clears, treat that value as unrecoverable. We would rather you plan around losing it than around a recovery we can’t demonstrate.

Someone else registering the name is not vandalism or a bug. It’s the protocol working exactly as specified, on a deadline that was public the whole time.

Putting the deadline where you’ll actually see it

The failure mode here isn’t ignorance, it’s inattention. People know names expire. They lose them anyway, because the deadline lived in a desktop app they open twice a year.

Tilde computes expiry for every name you own on the device, from the last block height it knows about, and schedules local iOS notifications at 90, 30, and 7 days before the estimated expiry date. A few properties of that worth stating plainly, because they’re the difference between a reminder and a promise:

The schedule is computed on your phone. There’s no server that knows your names, no subscription, and nothing to unsubscribe from. Notifications are local, not push.
The estimate degrades gracefully. If sync has been interrupted, the expiry calculation uses the last height the wallet is sure about, so an offline wallet still warns you rather than going quiet.
The estimate is still an estimate. It converts blocks to days at 10 minutes per block. The name detail screen shows the expiry height alongside the date, because that’s the number consensus enforces.

And renewing is a one-tap transaction from the name’s screen, which matters more than it sounds: a renewal you can do from a bus stop is a renewal that actually happens.

Questions people actually ask

How much does it cost to renew a Handshake name?

Only the transaction fee for a small covenant transaction — typically a fraction of an HNS. Handshake has no renewal price, because there is no registrar collecting one.

Can I renew early?

Yes, at any time while you own the name. The window resets from the block your RENEW confirms in. There’s no penalty and no partial credit to lose.

Does updating my DNS records renew the name?

Don’t rely on it. UPDATE and RENEW are different covenants with different purposes, and the number you should be watching is the renewal height in the name state plus 105,120. If that height isn’t moving forward, you haven’t renewed. Send an actual RENEW.

What if I miss the window by one block?

Then you missed it. There’s no rounding in your favour and no appeal. This is why the reminders start 90 days out.

Can I renew a name held in a wallet on another device?

Renewing requires signing with the key that owns the name, so it happens wherever that key is. If you restore the same seed phrase on your phone, you can renew from your phone.