- it makes it easier to raise capital by claiming that what you are doing involves crypto, because then you get crypto-type valuations
- you can get money from people who want to speculate
The negative is a lot of the TLDs sold on Handshake were sold to early interested parties, many of which were speculators. Unfortunately, other than an ICANN run solution, I can't think of a way to solve this since you need critical mass to make it fair, but can't get critical mass without having everything running.
Maybe they should have restricted the character length of the TLDs that were available to be auctioned at any given time based on the number of mined coins so more valuable TLDs wouldn't come available until, ideally, more people were onboarded to the service. Not sure there's a great solution there.
It, uh, didn't inspire a lot of confidence.