[palisade]

My understanding of it is that 100,000+ are in reserve for existing companies / sites already registered. All you have to do is contact them to let them know, with proof, that you want ownership of yours. After launch there will be a "sunrise" period where if you register with ICANN, and then provide proof to handshake, they will give you ownership. I'm not sure how long that period lasts, I'm guessing for a long time until they feel ICANN is no longer relevant if I had to guess.

The goal of the project seems admirable. Potentially, this can help fund open source initiatives which are sorely underfunded while solving the "how do we find a domain in a decentralized way and verify its trust" issue that currently exists. I suppose time will tell, though.

[xur17]

My understanding is that all current tlds (.com, .net, .org, etc) will be claimable once the service launches. In addition, everyone in the Alexa 100k will be able to claim their domain stripped of the tld, so example.com gets .example, root.com gets .root. Handshake is only handling top level domains - dns will continue to handle resolving of subdomains.

Icaan will continue to be relevant, this will just control all other tlds.

This is just my understanding after doing some reading last night - someone please correct me if I'm wrong.