There have been concerns and questions raised about this. Many thought it is “lifetime” ownership.

It is, but … you need to show you are still “alive”. Lifetime means, alive, right?

Every 2 years from the last time the renewal was done (or the name was redeemed/issued on the blockchain), OR from the last time it was transferred to another wallet (as transfers also adds another couple years during the transaction) . But please note, that is one WALLET to another, and in Namebase, gifting / selling / transferring your name from one Namebase account to another is not a transfer, as they are all within the Namebase HNS wallet.

So it is called a “heartbeat” transaction. Send a mining fee transaction from your wallet to the HNS blockchain to show you are still alive and using this name.

Now, I have had this video on the list to make for quite some time, but when I saw a 3L name go back to the auction pool, this was a perfect example to show what happens.

This name is kex/ (I think best use for this one is “Key exchange”)
https://e.hnsfans.com/name/kex

It sold on auction on Feb 21, 2020 for 500 HNS - but it seems the owner did not send the heartbeat renewal. And that means - it is back for auction!

It is also interesting to see how Namebase block explorer doesn’t even show the previous bids, but on other HNS block explorers it does.

So you can bid on this if you see this before Feb 23, 2022!

So most of us are on Namebase, or have at least some of our portfolio on Namebase - and they do have a convenient feature of auto-renewal.

This is from their terms:

https://learn.namebase.io/about-handshake/about-handshake#renewal-fees

This is NOT free, this means they do not charge an EXTRA fee on top of the TX (transaction) fee / mining fee that is sent to the blockchain to renew the name.

I myself haven’t yet witnessed a Namebase auto-renewal (as the names I own are not yet up for renewal), but I wonder what happens if you do not have any HNS in your Namebase account when the auto-renewal comes?

Will it not renew the name or will Namebase pay the mining fee to keep the name on your behalf? Or will it be like a Godaddy and take the name from you and then auction it off?

There is another point people in the community have said. One limitation of the HNS blockchain is 600 transactions per block. What happens when there are thousands or more of TLDs that need a heartbeat transaction renewal to be sent? Will it not allow those renewals and then they will drop?

Or can we send the heartbeat earlier. In Bob wallet, let us show you how you can send the renewal.

Now that we discussed the auto-renewal feature at Namebase (which we will observe and update as we go), lets discuss the more manual way at Bob Wallet.

Go to the Domain Manager, click into a name, and on the top there is a “renew” button. This will then prompt your password and then send that mining heartbeat transaction and withdraw the 0.05 (or whichever the min mining fee is) to the blockchain and then add 2 more years.

This is a new development, in recent updates of Bob Wallet, there is a feature in Domain Manager called “Bulk Transfer”.

Oscar told me this can be used a way to “bulk update”. How would that work - by transferring to your own wallet in bulk.

It is amazing 2 years have passed. And now we are in the “dropped” stage of Handshake TLDs.

Make sure you are on top of this, and understand that you need to be the one ultimately responsible.