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Joseph Poon and Andrew Lee are the two main co-founders of Handshake.

Lee quit a job at Merrill Lynch to co-found Purse — one of the largest marketplaces for Bitcoin in early 2014. As Purse expanded, he began to explore other ways of innovating in the marketplace and investing in infrastructure.

He and Poon had been discussing the ideas underpinning Handshake for years before they co-founded the company.

Aside from developing Handshake, Poon co-wrote the Plasma Papers in collaboration with Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.

Poon worked at a Big Four accounting firm before becoming involved in the crypto space, while in between jobs. He’s also the co-creator of the Lightning Network and Plasma.

Other co-founders include Boyma Fahnbulleh and Christopher Jeffrey.

One of the most unique features of Handshake is that it is not a blockchain project looking to fully decentralize current DNS infrastructure. It is rather about decentralizing the root zone — and/or the top-level domains.

This is because apart from the root zone, the entire of DNS is already decentralized.

Handshake’s white paper states: “the Handshake naming protocol differs from its predecessors in that it has no concept of namespacing or subdomains at the consensus layer. Its role is not to replace all of DNS, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers.”

A key concept about Handshake is that it aims to decentralize or reduce dependence on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN.)

ICANN was launched in 1998 as a non-profit partnership made of people across the globe, with the aim of keeping the internet more secure.

Handshake instead aims to use a decentralized application based on Proof-of-Work principles to improve the security of the internet.

Handshake is secured using the unspent transaction output (UTXO) of the blockchain and uses the principles of proof-of-work (PoW) in the same way as Bitcoin.

The naming system comprises on-chain smart contract features which are known as covenants, which are intended to limit the use of future transaction output.

Learn more about the difference between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.

Check out our deep dive into decentralized finance.

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