Handshake Revealed: VCs Back Plan to Give Away $100 Million in Crypto

A long-secret cryptocurrency project whose investor deck once touted Burning Man as central to its anti-capitalist ethos has finally arrived.

A remaining 7.5 percent of tokens will be set aside for the project's "Principles", though more notable is what's being done to quickly dismantle the entity that's bootstrapping the project and distribute the remaining 85 percent of tokens, each of which is valued at $0.10 at launch.

In interview, Poon touted the new cryptocurrency as an experiment that's heralding two leaps forward - an improvement on the existing CA system and domain registrars and also the initial coin offering model itself, which that has found untested projects raising millions.

Poon framed Handshake as a project intent on raising as little as possible, so that the largest amount could be given away to open-source developers.

All told, Handshake aims to give $250 worth of its tokens to users of websites like GitHub, the P2P Foundation and Freenode, a chat channel for peer-to-peer projects, meaning these developers could all receive up to $750 worth of tokens.

As for the distribution, Poon, Lee and Lee sought to position the model not as an airdrop, in which funds are cryptographically distributed to those who are already users of a blockchain, but a return to the "Faucet model" by which early adopters gave away thousands of bitcoin in order to get the word out about the project.

If rethinking the ICO and CA systems wasn't enough, Poon sought to brand the project in even larger terms, emphasizing how Handshake is properly expressive of what he sees as the key innovation behind cryptocurrencies - the ability to give value, not just create it.

Still, that's not to say getting the project off the ground didn't require time, legal work and the other trappings that have come to be associated with the ICO model.

In the case of Handshake, the project has been close to launch for at least three months, though Poon, Lee and Lee said it has been held up by questions of how to best position the wording around the project, as well as to finalize technical details.

The most notable change is that the project will no longer create a Handshake Foundation, a non-profit whose sole responsibility is to distribute the tokens and manage funds allocated to project contributors, instead automating the whole process to the extent possible.