Namecoin pioneered the space and Handshake learned a lot from Namecoin’s design (both what worked and importantly what didn’t work). As an example, in namecoin you could register any name for a flat fee (and iirc the fee actually goes down over time). This made it easy for whales and early adopters to buy up all the good names in the early days, which kills a naming system bc if all the good names are gone before the system gains adoption, there’s no incentive for newcomers to invest in and adopt the new naming system. Handshake has multiple mechanisms to prevent this. The first is that names are auctioned and not sold for a fixed price. We’ve already seen the importance of this in name auctions like crypto/ (highest bid was 500k HNS ~$200k
https://namebase.io/domains/crypto) and coin/ (highest bid was 200k HNS ~$80k
https://namebase.io/domains/coin). Furthermore, you don’t want early adopters to have a major unfair advantage when there’s less competition, so Handshake names are released for bidding over the course of 52 weeks. This allows for people who find out about Handshake 6 months from now to still be able to bid on good names