Can 'Dogfooding' Altcoins Find Real Users in 2020?

Which raises the question: If companies are giving tokens away, do they have a legitimate business with organic demand? So far, it appears there's more supply than take-up for many altcoins.

Few projects are relying on developers to "Dogfood" new software quite like Handshake, a project spearheaded by co-creator of bitcoin's lightning network, Joseph Poon, Purse CEO Andrew Lee, and Private Internet Access founder Andrew Lee, just to name a few.

The plan is to airdrop roughly $100 million worth of Handshake tokens at launch to thousands of developers with active GitHub accounts.

Coinbase is considering listing Handshake tokens on its exchange.

Primitive Ventures co-founder Eric Meltzer told CoinDesk his firm will run a Handshake node at launch.

New startups such as the crypto exchange Namebase.io and the developer tools startup Urkel both plan to launch alongside the Handshake mainnet.

Farsight Security CTO Ben April, who specializes in security solutions at the startup spearheaded by DNS co-creator Paul Vixie, said he's not optimistic about Handshake because it doesn't address surveillance of a censored website's traffic.

That's why ConsenSys engineer Shayan Eskandari is talking to the incumbent nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers about Handshake and other groups associated with core internet protocols.

Although CoreDNS contributor Michael Grosser, founder of the DNS provider GitNS.com, agreed with April that Handshake doesn't offer full stack censorship resistance, he was more optimistic about the Handshake Foundation offering an alternative to ICANN. Community building takes time.

Blockstream's Togami retorted that merely being an open source project doesn't mean the team is entitled to funding, especially not via tokens traded by retail users.