The dWeb Foundation is focused on the mainstream adoption of Handshake: the Decentralized Web (dWeb) Foundation, a new private Singaporean entity that functions as a nonprofit charitable organization. It conducts its activities in a transparent way that’s accountable to the Handshake community and provides grants to support the main pillars of Handshake's ecosystem: integrations, liquidity, third-party services such as mobile applications, and core development.

What follows is an informal overview of the dWeb Foundation, covering two major topics: how the Foundation is funded, and what its funds will be used for. This Foundation is just one of many entities that was formed by active members of the Handshake community. It operates alongside other community-organized initiatives and startups like HNS Fund, Impervious, Kyokan, and Handshake Institute, which are each filling various gaps that come between Handshake and mass adoption. Organizational Structure

The dWeb Foundation is structured as a private company limited by shares incorporated in Singapore. The shares of the Foundation will have no value, as it has no profit motive. The organization will be operated by a board of directors, comprising of Chjango Unchained and Jehan Chu, who are working part-time on this initiative.

Chjango Unchained received no HNS allocation outside of the faucet airdrop. Jehan Chu, through his fund, Kenetic Capital, received a small early investor’s allocation of HNS.

The primary source of funding will come from private donations from community members interested in the work that we are proposing to do.

The Foundation’s current founding donors who have funded the Foundation are Jun Dam, Handshake Jesus, and Kenetic Capital.

The Foundation has accepted a grant from Flare.xyz to build a SLD solution on its platform which has Handshake natively integrated into it. The total grant amount, upon delivery of the product, would be 2.5M FLR tokens.

We have identified various gaps in the Handshake community that the Foundation seeks to fill. There are gaps related to ecosystem development, developer and vendor relations, access to funding, and the existence of a counterparty to sign legally binding agreements with partners and service providers. The Foundation has the capacity and willingness to fill each of those gaps in order to fulfill its mandate: to make HNS price fully realize its market potential.

Bi-annually, the Foundation will publish a retrospective on the projects it has given grants to, outline KPIs that it has hit, and enumerate any additional work it intends to prioritize to hit its next milestones. This will be accompanied by a bi-annual financial report, detailing each area of expenditure over the past two quarters.

Below, we summarize some of the myriad responsibilities towards which the Foundation is expected to allocate its resources:

Major exchanges require a counterparty and access to a project's technical support/developer relations team so that in the event when things go wrong, they have someone to go to. Handshake's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness in this regard. No core team means that exchanges have no party to interact with, and this was one of the problems that caused Grin to die a slow death. By having a legal entity backing this Foundation, it can serve a functional purpose by interfacing with exchanges to get Handshake across a critical milestone that every coin must get past.

Of course, solving liquidity isn't the exclusive right of centralized exchange gatekeepers. It's solvable with DeFi as well. Since the Foundation's members are native users of DeFi applications, the Foundation additionally would seek alternate routes to reach Destination: Liquid HNS.

This is one of the most important responsibilities that the Foundation intends to steward and see delivered. Hnsd, Handshake’s SPV resolver for decentralized name resolution, requires additional core development attention and third-party auditing to be ready for major usage. Meaning, after this is production-ready, a point-and-click hnsd app for all platforms would allow users to browse the web and resolve Handshake names locally on a totally decentralized p2p system without ever experiencing any noticeable delay compared to browsing on the traditional web. It goes without saying that this work would be open-source and pushed upstream to hnsd.

The Foundation seeks to fund the completion of this type of work. Productionizing hnsd is extremely powerful and would lead to Handshake’s killer use case.

We intend to allocate grants to vendors who provide excellent work in building local Handshake communities in their region offline or globally online. These grants will ideally be disbursed in HNS (provided that the Foundation has the requisite funds), and will pay for conferences, bounties, hackathons, and other community-driven endeavours.

We observed an uptick in HNS price that persisted linearly upwards ever since HandyCon. There was clearly value there that allowed an otherwise disparate community to come together and meet other like-minded individuals who are each passionate and enthusiastic about Handshake. Recurring online and offline events are important to have for this reason.

It’s tantamount that Handshake has multiple performant and easy-to-use wallet providers in order to see the light of user adoption. One open-source wallet like Bob isn’t enough, and one custodian like Namebase isn’t enough. Handshake needs multiple clean and beautiful one-stop-shops on iOS, Android, as a browser extension, as well as in-browser wallets that will allow users to manage their names, buy/sell on the secondary market directly in-app, as well as transact in HNS.

In addition, the Foundation seeks to facilitate Handshake integration into major browsers so that TLD holders can resolve their names in the browser, which is the primary reason why you're using Handshake in the first place.

Most open-source orgs who have been given significant HNS allocations as the incentive for them to claim their names haven’t done so yet because they don’t know about it. As such, someone needs to tell each of them about it, while doing it in a way that convinces them this thing is not a scam. Getting developers and open-source organizations to claim their reserved names, and subsequently, their airdrops, would be a manual process, and can be a responsibility that the Foundation can help fill.

Although the idea of meritocracy and the expectation that “if you build it, they will come” is pervasive in Handshake, because it was true of Bitcoin, it may not necessarily come without some form of guidance from teams actively working to make this happen. Handshake was not launched in 2009 like Bitcoin was. It is 2021, in the middle of a bull market, and every new coin almost certainly has a core team, a foundation, and a charismatic spiritual leader with huge treasuries to deploy millions of dollars into marketing, community development, paying-to-play to get major integrations, and more. This Foundation was not incorporated for want of money or for creating a centralizing force for an otherwise leaderless project. This Foundation was created in order to get Handshake across the first and most difficult hurdle: solving the onramp/liquidity problem. The last thing anyone in this community wants is for Handshake to go in the way of Grin. The establishment of this Foundation helps to ensure that Handshake doesn’t.

The Foundation’s treasury will be controlled by multisig addresses for each cryptocurrency under management (e.g. HNS, FLR, BTC, ETH, etc.).

Grants will, by default, be paid out in HNS, but in the event that the Foundation’s HNS funds are depleted, grants will be paid out in alternative currencies that the recipients agree to accept. Some of the Foundation's operational expenditures must be paid in USD or SGD. Accordingly, the Foundation will convert, at its discretion, a portion of its monthly withdrawals to fiat currency in order to pay for services it needs. The Foundation plans to place a percentage of its holdings into interest-bearing assets so as to sustain itself in the absence of a revenue-generating model.

We see the emergence of the dWeb Foundation, HNS Fund, and the Handshake Institute as bullish signals of Handshake’s potential to reach mass adoption. These efforts provide the ecosystem with sustainable sources of funding that act as Schelling points for making meaningful progress towards our North Star, to make the Handshake economy realize its full potential. It’s a testament to a truly grassroots movement.

The idea of members of a cryptocurrency community stepping up and putting in sweat equity without being employed by a central team is a testament to the robustness of this project. It’s unprecedented, with the exception of the early Bitcoin community, as the early Handshake community is repeating some of the patterns of how the former had self-organized. We’ve only marched past the first year mark for Handshake, which means there’s very high chances that this project will take off at an exponential rate once it’s reached maturation.

It would be an honor for dWeb Foundation to be one of the organizations standing side-by-side with you, its earliest adopters, when that time comes.