Punycode, Unicode & Multilingual Digital Identities in Web3 through Handshake Domains

Abstract

The internet was architected on a 128-character encoding that systematically excluded billions of speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Turkish, Hindi, and every other non-Latin script. Two interlocking standards broke that constraint: Unicode — the universal map of every human character to a unique codepoint — and Punycode (RFC 3492), which translates Unicode into ASCII-compatible encodings the legacy Domain Name System can process. The emergence of Handshake (HNS), a decentralised proof-of-work naming blockchain, extends this capability into Web3 without any central gatekeeper. Handshake allows any individual to auction, own, and resolve top-level domains in any script — including emoji — through sovereign cryptographic ownership.