As we have uncovered, the Namecoin contributors on GitHub, namely and most notably Daniel Kraft, Jeremy Rand, and the user under the pseudonym yanmaani, received an airdrop of 10.2 million HNS in February 2020, according to Handshake's whitepaper. We need to clarify here that most of the listed contributors, and thus the members with the most contributions such as laanwj, MarcoFalke and sipa, have never contributed a single line of code directly to Namecoin. For example, since the Namecoin Core wallet is forked and regularly imported from the Bitcoin Core repository, the original contributions to the Bitcoin Core wallet are automatically shown in the Namecoin fork as well, without these contributors even knowing it. The members active exclusively on the Namecoin repository can be found e.g. in the open issues.

The huge airdrop for the Namecoin contributors was sent to the handshake multisig address hs1qme9hk473uwkgk8293pyjea2dysrrweedk3jfcdnmzey432ctl06q4nk370. This airdrop was intended as a personal donation to active and previous Namecoin contributors and has been spent on February 20, 2020 at block 2872, worth approximately $1 million USD at the time of the airdrop. In order to obtain this airdrop, the Namecoin contributors had to apply for the pseudo TLD (top level domain) .bit within the handshake network with the DNSSEC proof of ownership of the subdomain bit.namecoin.org. The claim was then made with the TxID 4cf79769efba09e0eb1ed446f8d8200579fd67967eb9252b834475eb5c2878a9, which was symbolically rewarded with 503 HNS (in addition to the airdrop of 10.2 million HNS).

Referring to the news section on namecoin.org (see also the current Wayback archive), this airdrop has never been publicly declared by the Namecoin contributors, nor was it ever declared how the airdrop was split and who received which amount. For further details, see the discussion in the Handshake Telegram group. By the way, recently we had a very nice discussion with J.R. & Co....