Picking the Iceberg Back Up
In Part I we mapped the internet as an iceberg: the visible apps and sites on the surface, the hidden ICANN root just below the waterline, and Handshake's decentralized root sitting deeper still, underneath the old one. That post explained the layers. This one is a survey: who is actually building at each depth right now, in the summer of 2026, and just as importantly, who has pulled back.
An honest map has to include both. Anyone teaching this space owes readers the full picture, not just the exciting parts.
Depth One: The Surface, Where Retail Access Lives
This is the layer most people touch first: browsers, wallets, and registrars that let an ordinary person buy and use a name. It is also the layer that has seen the most turbulence this year.
- Namecheap was, until recently, the largest retail on-ramp into Handshake. In January 2026 it sold Namebase, the marketplace it had operated for buying and selling Handshake names, to an undisclosed buyer. Five months later, on June 10, 2026, Namecheap halted all new Handshake registrations, renewals, transfers, and management on its own platform, citing the wind-down of an unnamed upstream provider, with no migration path offered to existing customers. Eleven TLDs were carved out and continue operating as usual; the rest are frozen in place with no stated end date.
- Bob Wallet, built by Kyokan and Shadstone Labs, is the self-custodial alternative that does not depend on any registrar staying in business. It runs a full Handshake node locally, handles auctions and bidding directly, and is the path the community points to for anyone who wants independence from a platform's decision to stay or leave.
- SkyInclude operates as both an educational hub and a registrar/registry, and has been one of the most consistent independent voices publishing tutorials, hard fork coverage, and technical walkthroughs for TLD owners who want to run their own registry rather than depend on a single company.
- Smaller registrars such as Porkbun, Encirca, HNS.ID, and Varo Domains continue to offer Handshake SLDs, though coverage and prominence vary and none currently matches the retail reach Namecheap once had.
The structural problem this layer has never solved: no mainstream browser resolves a Handshake name natively. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge all require an extension or a custom DNS resolver. That single gap is the reason retail adoption has stayed a fraction of what token prices once implied it would become.
Depth Two: The Middle Layer, Where Builders and Educators Sit
Below retail access is the layer of people actually building things with names, and teaching others how the protocol works. This is where LearnHNS itself operates, alongside a small number of consistent publishers and toolmakers.
- Applications built on names, such as hns.chat, which uses a Handshake domain as a single chat and user ID, are early examples of the "name as identity, not just address" thesis from Part I actually shipping in a working product, even at small scale.
- DNSSEC and DANE/TLSA tooling continues to be documented and built out for TLD owners who want their names to carry real cryptographic trust guarantees, the security use case that matters most for anything touching finance or sensitive data.
- Content and education, the layer this site occupies, remains one of the more resilient parts of the ecosystem: it does not depend on a registrar staying open or a token price holding, only on the protocol continuing to run.
Depth Three: The Protocol Layer, Where the Chain Itself Lives
This is the deepest and, in an important sense, the most durable layer, because it does not depend on any company's business decision.
- Mining and consensus continue on Handshake's proof-of-work chain independent of retail sentiment. The block reward has stepped down through scheduled halvings, the same mechanism Bitcoin uses, and blocks keep landing on a roughly ten-minute cadence regardless of what any single registrar decides to do.
- Protocol governance is active through the HIPs (Handshake Improvement Proposals) process, with core developers and community contributors, not a founding company, steering the roadmap. A significant V2 proposal has been under public debate through early 2026, covering ideas like reserving existing ICANN TLD strings for their recognized owners, opening previously restricted names for wider claiming, and building a layer-two chain for smart contracts and on-chain second-level name issuance.
- TLD owner incentive programs, including a multi-phase HNS airdrop to TLD-owning communities, are an attempt by the governance process to keep long-term holders engaged even while retail attention has moved elsewhere.
This layer is the clearest evidence of Handshake's original thesis in Part I: because no single company controls the root, no single company's exit can end it. Namecheap leaving is a real, meaningful contraction of the surface layer. It is not a shutdown of the protocol underneath.
Who Has Retreated, and Why That Matters
A fair map also has to show the pullback, because it explains a lot about where the space actually stands:
- Unstoppable Domains, which raised roughly $70 million in venture funding and sold more than four million blockchain domain registrations, has openly repositioned. Its CEO acknowledged in March 2026 that blockchain names were part of the 2021 speculative cycle and never reached mainstream use; the company is now ICANN-accredited as a traditional registrar, and standard DNS domains make up the large majority of its business.
- ENS (Ethereum Name Service) chose a different route than staying purely on-chain: it applied to ICANN's 2026 new gTLD round for .ens as a conventional top-level domain, effectively acknowledging that browser compatibility requires working within, not outside, the existing root.
- HNS itself has fallen 99.85% from its all-time high of $0.8528 on May 5, 2021, to its all-time low of $0.001203 on July 9, 2026, with market capitalization now under $1 million at that low point.
None of this means the underlying idea from Part I, that root-level naming should not depend on a single gatekeeper, has stopped mattering. It means the market badly overpriced how fast that idea would translate into everyday, browser-native usage. Speculative capital arrived years ahead of the infrastructure that would have justified it, and most of that capital has now left.
What the Honest Landscape Looks Like Right Now
Put the depths together and the picture is this: the surface layer is thinner than it was a year ago, with one major retail on-ramp gone and no replacement of equal size yet. The middle layer of builders, tools, and education is smaller but more committed, since the people still here are here for the protocol, not the token chart. The deepest layer, mining and governance, keeps running exactly as designed, because that was always the part that did not depend on any company's continued participation.
That is the real state of the iceberg beneath the iceberg: a contraction at the surface, real ongoing work in the middle, and an unaffected foundation at the bottom. Anyone evaluating this space in 2026 should weigh all three, not just the one that is easiest to see.