Home on Tilde — Handshake (HNS) Wallet for iPhone

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

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Handshake name auctions, explained from your phone

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Handshake doesn’t sell names first-come-first-served, and it doesn’t run an eBay-style visible auction. Every name is allocated by a sealed-bid Vickrey auction: bids are hidden while bidding is open, and the winner pays the second-highest bid rather than their own.

That format is deliberate. It means bidding your honest maximum is the rational move — you can’t be punished for it, because you’ll pay whatever the runner-up was willing to pay, not what you wrote down. It also means the mechanics involve some cryptography you’d rather your wallet handled for you. Here’s what’s happening underneath.

What SPV actually verifies — and what it doesn't

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Verify, don’t trust” is easy to put on a landing page and harder to say precisely. This is the precise version: what a Handshake light client on a phone checks for itself, what it takes on faith, and where our implementation is currently weaker than the theory allows.

If you only read one paragraph: Tilde verifies proof-of-work on every block header it accepts, and verifies name ownership with Urkel tree proofs against those headers, so no server can lie to you about who owns a name or what its DNS records say. It does not validate every transaction in every block. That’s a full node’s job, and we don’t claim to do it.

Bob Wallet vs Tilde: an honest comparison

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you own Handshake names today, you probably got them through Bob Wallet. It’s the desktop GUI most of the ecosystem was built on — open source, built by Kyokan, maintained in the bob-wallet GitHub organisation — and it ships an integrated hsd node, which means it validates the chain itself rather than trusting anyone’s API.

We are not going to pretend Bob is bad software so that ours looks better. Bob is good, and some of what it does we can’t do at all. The useful question isn’t “which wallet wins”, it’s “which machine is the name deadline going to find you on”.

FAQ

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What is Handshake?

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