If you've ever tried to look "under the hood" of Handshake — to see who owns a name, how an auction is going, which pool mined the last block, or when the next halving hits — you've probably landed on shakeshift.com. It's the most complete block explorer built for the Handshake (HNS) network, and it exposes almost every piece of on-chain data the protocol produces. The problem is that most people click around it without understanding what half the numbers mean. This is a lesson-by-lesson breakdown of every section of Shakeshift, what it's showing you, and why it matters. By the end, you'll be able to read the explorer the way a Handshake node operator does.
1. What Shakeshift Actually Is
Shakeshift is a block explorer for the Handshake blockchain. A block explorer is a website that reads the raw blockchain — blocks, transactions, addresses, and the special Handshake-specific data like name auctions — and presents it in a searchable, human-readable interface. Handshake isn't a general-purpose smart contract chain like Ethereum. It's a chain purpose-built for one job: decentralizing the root zone of the naming system, i.e. replacing the trust placed in ICANN with a permissionless, auction-based namespace. Because of that, Shakeshift isn't just a "coin tracker" — most of its interface is dedicated to names: how they're auctioned, who owns them, when they expire, and what DNS records are attached to them. At the top of every page, Shakeshift shows you a live snapshot of the whole network: current block height, total unique names ever seen, total addresses, total transactions, circulating supply, total issued supply, locked supply (coins tied up in active auctions), and burned supply (coins permanently destroyed by the protocol's auction mechanism). That single strip of numbers is actually a mini-lesson in Handshake tokenomics on its own — HNS is inflationary at first (issuance from block subsidies) but also deflationary in the margins, because every winning auction bid burns HNS rather than paying it to anyone.
2. Blocks
The Blocks section is the most basic layer of any blockchain explorer: a chronological list of every block that's been mined, with its height, the time it was found, how many transactions it contains, its size in kilobytes, and the total fees paid inside it. Handshake blocks are produced roughly every 10 minutes, similar to Bitcoin, because Handshake actually forked Bitcoin's consensus code and reused Proof-of-Work mining with the SHA3-256/BLAKE2b-based Handshake hashing scheme. Clicking into an individual block shows you every transaction it confirmed — including any name-related covenants (opens, bids, reveals, registers, renewals, transfers) that happened to land in that block. If you're auditing whether a specific auction bid was actually confirmed on-chain, the block page is where you go to verify it, transaction by transaction.
3. Names
This is the heart of Handshake, and Shakeshift's Names section is built around it. Every second-level name that has ever touched the Handshake root zone — whether it's currently available, in an active auction, registered, or expired — has a page here. A name's page on Shakeshift shows you its full lifecycle: when it was minted (opened for auction), its current state (Available, Opening, Bidding, Reveal, Registered, Expired, Revoked, etc.), the owning address, how many times it's been transferred, any DNS resources attached to it, and its full covenant history — every OPEN, BID, REVEAL, REGISTER, RENEW, TRANSFER, and FINALIZE action ever applied to it, each one a real on-chain transaction. If a name is currently listed for sale on a secondary marketplace like Namebase or ShakeStation, Shakeshift will show that listing and price directly on the name's page too. Understanding "covenants" is the single most important concept for reading Shakeshift's name pages. A covenant is a rule attached to a specific Handshake transaction output that restricts what can be done with it next — it's how the entire auction-and-ownership system is enforced at the protocol level without needing a centralized registrar. Every action you can take on a name (bidding, revealing, registering, renewing, transferring, finalizing, updating DNS records, revoking) is its own covenant type, and Shakeshift's Stats page (see section 6) tracks the running totals of each one across the whole chain.
4. Auctions
The Auctions page is a live dashboard of every name currently up for grabs. Shakeshift breaks it into useful sortable views — auctions ending soonest, auctions with the most bids, and auctions with the highest lockup (the largest amount of HNS currently committed by bidders). To actually understand what you're looking at, you need to know how a Handshake auction works, because it's a two-phase blind auction, not a simple highest-bidder system:
- Open period — Anyone can "open" an available name, which starts a bidding window (Shakeshift shows the live countdown for each name).
- Bidding period — Bidders submit sealed (blinded) bids. Each bid actually locks up two amounts on-chain: the real bid, and a "blind" — extra HNS sent along to obscure the real bid amount from other bidders and from miners. No one can see what anyone else bid during this phase.
- Reveal period — Bidders reveal their true bid amounts. The blind portion is returned to each bidder regardless of outcome.
- Settlement (Vickrey auction) — Here's the part that surprises newcomers: the winner isn't charged their own bid. The highest bidder wins the name, but only pays the second-highest bid amount. This is called a Vickrey (second-price sealed-bid) auction, and it's a deliberate design choice to discourage bid-sniping and encourage bidders to reveal their true valuation. The difference between what the winner bid and what they actually pay is refunded; the amount they do pay is burned, not sent to a seller — because there is no seller. This is the core of HNS's deflationary mechanic mentioned in section 1.
Reading the Auctions page with this in mind changes how you interpret the numbers: "Highest Lockup" isn't the price someone will pay — it's the ceiling. The real price only becomes known once bids are revealed. (For a more advanced look at how automated bidding agents are starting to compete in these auctions, LearnHNS has covered that too.)
5. Addresses
The Addresses section works like it does on any UTXO-based explorer (Handshake, like Bitcoin, uses the UTXO model rather than Ethereum's account model). Every address page shows its current balance broken into available, locked, and unlocked HNS, plus every name it currently owns. What's Handshake-specific here is the "Names" breakdown on each address: because owning a name is itself represented as a locked coin controlled by that address's covenant chain, an address's HNS balance and its name portfolio are tightly linked. An address showing "1 Name, 15.00 HNS" isn't holding spare change — that 15 HNS is literally the value locked into the ownership of that specific name. This is also where you'll trace real transaction history: every REGISTER, RENEW, TRANSFER, and FINALIZE action tied to that address, with amounts, fees, and confirmation counts, exactly the kind of trail you'd use to verify a name's provenance before buying it secondhand.
6. Stats & Charts
The Stats page is the deepest data layer on the whole site — this is where you go when you want the full accounting of the chain, not just a snapshot. It's organized into sections worth understanding individually:
- Unique Names — total names ever seen, split between plain ASCII names and IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) names, i.e. names using non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic or CJK characters, which Handshake supports natively.
- Name States — a live census of every name's current status: Available, Reserved, Auction, Pending Registration, Registered, Expired, Revoked.
- Name Registrations / Expirations / Transfers — running totals of every lifecycle event that's happened to a name.
- Reserved Names — Handshake reserved roughly 100,000 of the most-visited names from the legacy DNS root (based on Alexa/Tranco top-site data) for their original owners to claim rather than forcing everyone into an open auction. This section tracks how many of those reservations have been claimed, are still unclaimed, or have lapsed.
- Supply — the full token accounting: circulating supply, issued supply, burned supply, and the "effective maximum" supply (a number lower than Handshake's original theoretical max, because unclaimed airdrop and reservation allocations are permanently forfeited over time rather than reissued).
- Auction Lockup — total HNS currently locked across all live auctions, split by bids, blinds, and unrevealed amounts — useful for gauging how much capital is actively competing for names right now.
- Covenants — the running count of every covenant type ever executed (OPEN, BID, REVEAL, REDEEM, REGISTER, UPDATE, RENEW, TRANSFER, FINALIZE, REVOKE, CLAIM). This is the most literal way to see how the protocol has actually been used, transaction type by transaction type.
- Chain — raw blockchain size metrics: block count, total transactions, inputs, outputs, and full chain size in gigabytes.
Below the tables, Shakeshift renders time-series charts for most of these metrics, letting you see growth trends — new name registrations per month, hashrate over time, chain size growth, and more — rather than just point-in-time totals.
7. Marketplace
The Marketplace page aggregates secondary-market activity for Handshake names — names that have already been won at auction and are now being resold peer-to-peer, the same way a domain aftermarket works for traditional TLDs. It tracks two views: current Listings (names actively for sale right now, filterable by price, length, name type, and platform) and historical Sales (a running count of every completed secondary sale Shakeshift has indexed). Right now, this indexes listings and sales from the two major Handshake-compatible marketplaces, Namebase and ShakeStation. This matters for anyone doing due diligence on a name before buying it secondhand: you can check a name's full sale history and see whether the asking price lines up with what it's actually traded for before.
8. SLDs (Second-Level Domains)
The SLDs page is different from the Names section — it's not tracking the Handshake root-zone auctions themselves, but the actual second-level domains registered underneath Handshake TLDs through traditional-feeling registrars. Once someone wins a Handshake TLD like .fam or .dojo at auction, they can run it as a registry and let other people register names under it (e.g. vic.fam), often through familiar-feeling registrars like Namecheap, Porkbun, or ShakeStation itself, or independent Handshake-native registrars like HNS.ID. Each row shows the SLD name, its parent zone (the TLD), which registry is responsible for it, which registrar processed the registration, and its creation/expiration dates. This is genuinely one of the more overlooked parts of the explorer — it's the clearest evidence that Handshake TLDs are turning into functioning, usable namespaces rather than just speculative auction assets. There's also a separate Zones tab that lists every TLD currently operating as an active second-level registry.
9. Pools (Mining Pools)
The Pools page tracks who is actually securing the Handshake network through Proof-of-Work mining. It splits into Known Pools (mining pools that have publicly identified themselves) and Unknown Miners (hashrate that Shakeshift can see on-chain but can't attribute to a named entity). For each pool, you get blocks mined and hashrate share across four rolling windows (30 days, 10 days, 3 days, 24 hours), plus an "All Pools" table with lifetime totals: first block mined, last block mined, total subsidies earned, total fees earned, and total revenue. This page is genuinely important for network-health analysis, not just trivia — mining centralization is one of the real, ongoing risks to any Proof-of-Work chain. If you look at the current numbers, ANTPOOL alone has been controlling well over a third of recent hashrate, with Mining-Dutch and CyberPool as the next largest — which is exactly the kind of concentration worth watching over time rather than a one-off snapshot. For a deeper walkthrough of how blocks actually get found, LearnHNS has a full explainer on HNS mining pools.
10. Hashrate
The Hashrate page charts the total computational power securing the network over time, measured in hashes per second (currently in the petahash range for Handshake). Hashrate is the single best proxy for how expensive it would be to attack the chain — a 51% attack requires controlling more than half of this number. Rising hashrate generally signals growing miner confidence in the network's long-term value; sharp drops can signal miners rotating hardware toward more profitable chains, since much of Handshake's mining hardware is shared with other SHA3/Blake2b-adjacent networks.
11. Halvings
The Halvings page tracks Handshake's block subsidy schedule — another concept borrowed directly from Bitcoin's monetary design. Every 170,000 blocks (roughly every 3.2 years), the amount of new HNS paid to miners per block is cut in half. Handshake launched with a 2,000 HNS block subsidy. The first halving hit in April 2023, dropping it to 1,000 HNS. The second Handshake halving already happened in July 2026, dropping it to 500 HNS. The third halving is scheduled for block 510,000, estimated around October 2029, which will cut the subsidy to 250 HNS. Shakeshift lays out the entire schedule all the way out to the 30th and final halving around the year 2117, after which no new HNS will ever be issued from block subsidies again. This page is the fastest way to understand Handshake's long-term supply curve without doing the math yourself.
12. Signaling (Soft Fork Deployments)
The Signaling page tracks protocol upgrades — soft forks — and how miners have voted on activating them. Handshake uses a BIP9-style signaling mechanism (again, borrowed from Bitcoin's playbook): miners include a flag in the blocks they mine to "signal" support for a proposed rule change. If enough of the network signals support within a defined window, the change locks in and then activates automatically. Each deployment on this page shows its current state (Active, Failed, or still signaling), the percentage of miners that signaled support, the required threshold (typically 95%), and the exact block ranges for when signaling started, locked in, and activated. As of now, two soft forks have successfully activated — ICANN Lockup and Airstop — while an early proposal called Hardening failed to reach its threshold and expired. Airstop is especially worth understanding: it's the soft fork that permanently disabled any further airdrop claims once it activated, which is directly relevant to the next section.
13. Airdrops
The Airdrops page documents Handshake's original token distribution — arguably the most important piece of Handshake's origin story for newcomers to understand, because it's what makes the "decentralized from day one" claim credible. Instead of a pre-mine or an ICO, roughly half of Handshake's eventual supply was airdropped for free to two groups: the Merkle Tree category, allocated to over 216,000 open-source developers (anyone with accounts on GitHub, npm, Ruby Gems, PyPI, or a handful of other developer platforms meeting certain activity thresholds, each eligible to claim 4,246.99 HNS), and the Faucet category, allocated to early project sponsors, contributors, and people who signed up before launch. This page lists every individual airdrop claim — recipient address, category, amount, and the block it was issued in — which makes it a real, auditable record rather than a marketing claim. Note the callout at the top of the page: airdrop claims were permanently disabled once the Airstop soft fork (section 12) activated, so this list is now a closed, historical record rather than an ongoing distribution.
14. Putting It Together: How to Actually Use Shakeshift
Once you understand what each section represents, Shakeshift stops being a wall of numbers and becomes a genuinely useful research tool. A few practical workflows:
- Before bidding on a name — check its Name page for full covenant history, then check the Marketplace for any prior sale price, so you're not bidding blind against your own assumptions.
- Before buying a name secondhand — trace the seller's Address page to confirm they actually hold the name and see how long they've held it.
- Before trusting a resolver or registrar claim — cross-check the SLDs page to see whether a domain is genuinely anchored on-chain under a real Handshake TLD.
- To judge network health — look at Pools and Hashrate together, not in isolation. Rising hashrate with heavy concentration in one or two pools is a very different signal than rising hashrate spread across many.
- To understand long-term HNS supply — read Halvings alongside the Supply section of Stats. The "Effective Maximum" figure is the number that actually matters for long-term valuation models, not the original theoretical maximum.
As with any explorer, remember that Shakeshift is a lens on the chain, not the chain itself. Names you find "available" on Shakeshift should still be verified against your own resolver before you assume you can register them, and any name you're relying on for DNS resolution should be checked with a resolver that actually anchors to the Handshake root — not a centralized DNS override.
Built by NIHON — Handshake Infrastructure & Web3 Identity. Follow more Handshake education at LearnHNS.