A root zone owned by its users instead of a central authority.
Every domain you’ve ever used — .com, .org, all of them — exists by permission of a root zone controlled by a handful of organizations. Handshake replaces that root with a blockchain, so top-level names can be owned outright: no registrar, no renewal rent to a company, no one who can take it back.
How you get a name
Names are released by Vickrey auction — a sealed-bid format where the winner pays the second-highest price.
Your bid is hidden on-chain, optionally masked with a decoy amount. Nobody knows what anyone offered.
After bidding closes you have 1,440 blocks — about ten days — to reveal. Miss it and the bid you locked up is gone for good. Tilde reminds you before it bites.
The name is yours at the protocol level. Renew it every 105,120 blocks — roughly two years — with a transaction, not a fee to a company, and it stays yours.
Tilde is the only wallet that carries this whole lifecycle on a phone — browse, bid, reveal, renew. Our own name, tildewallet/, was won from the app — and this page is served at that name as well as at tildewallet.com. If you arrived through tildewallet/, you just loaded a website through a name nobody can revoke. That is the entire argument, working.
Why the trailing slash?
Handshake names are top-level — yourname/ isn’t short for yourname.com; it is the root. The community writes names with a trailing slash to say exactly that. And in Unix, ~/ is your home directory — which is why this wallet is called Tilde. Your names live at home, with you.
The ecosystem doesn’t need more believers. It needs believers who can show someone.
Handshake has been held back by tooling that lives at a desk. A name you can pull up on your phone, in front of a friend, is a different argument entirely. That’s the job Tilde exists to do.