Bargaining On a Handshake Name at the Namebase Marketplace

Are you looking for a Handshake TLD and it is already through with auction?

Here at SkyInclude we recently received an email from someone looking for help.

He hadn’t been involved in the Handshake auctions and has a specific name for his tech project already. He hopped into the Namebase TLD domain search and it was taken.

There wasn’t a buy now price, but make an offer is there.

He put in a 50 HNS offer, as that is how much HNS he currently had in his account (there are limits in Namebase for making offers above the balance you have).

The current TLD owner came back with a counter of

Ready for it

1,000,000 HNS (about $200,000 USD in today’s conversion).

This shocked our emailer and he asked for our help. He wants to build on Handshake and use this name, and needs our advise. (We at SkyInclude are offering a broker service at SkyInclude.com/broker/ )

Our Advise - 3 Choices

It is a tricky situation - and one we are a bit embarrassed about as advocates of Handshake. Maybe this TLD owner really wants 1 million HNS and won’t budge. Maybe he/she will squat on this name for years and decades until he/she gets that price.

Or maybe - they were annoyed by the “low ball” offer of 50 HNS and came back with a massive price as a way to say “make a real offer”.

  • Option 1: Come back with a higher offer

    Don’t get discouraged! In early 2021, no one expects you to pay 1 million HNS for a name. The highest was nft/ at about 680,000 HNS, but after that the highest was 200,000 HNS for xx/. And then after that much lower. So not likely the name you want is more valuable than those, right? Well if they are - pay up - as we are still bullish on prices and opportunities. If you offer 50, and they come back 1 million. Reconsider how much you want to pay. We are thinking to come back with a 1,000 HNS offer. We see the 1 million reply as a “get real dude, and give me a real offer”. So try something “real” and a 1,000 HNS seems fair enough. Maybe they will take that. And we believe that is a fair price for any name that you would desire.

  • Option 2: Ask for SkyInclude’s Help

    We can try to locate the owner. We can use our network and ask around who owns this name. We may first try to even guess who it can be (based on bidding pattern and date of thee auction, we have insights) - and message a few select “whales” to see if it is them. We can negotiate for you, and if you are truly going to use this name, and have a business case for it, we believe most current owners will want to see it put to good use.

  • Option 3: Find another name!

    The worst case, give up on the name. Personally at SkyInclude, we lost an auction on a name we had plans for. We tried to make an offer and similar experience as the person emailing us today. The seller just wants a price way higher than we are willing to pay. So there are 2 ways to do this - a variation of that name (adding extra words or hyphens), or, a totally different name/brand.

The Perspective of that Owner (squatter)

So to give you some insights on the owner of that Handshake name.

It has happened to me. I agreed to sell a name at a very reasonable price.

You know what happened?

That buyer is trying to “flip it” and I got an email alert from Namebase that it was relisted for thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of HNS in the marketplace.

That annoys me. I was selling at a low price thinking this person would be using that name - not trying to flip it.

If there was a way to verify the buyer was actually going to use the name, that would help a lot in the ecosystem.

What are your insights?

Again, this is a brand new market and marketplace. It is a wild west situation - and there are squatters out there unfortunately.

We hope to get more adoption - and if you are a big whale and squatter sitting on thousands or more of Handshake TLDs - please re-consider your strategy.

Allowing people, end users, to build on Handshake is the best way for your entire portfolio to grow.

We at SkyInclude hope to help broker deals and spread more adoption. Hope owners out there now can re-consider their prices.