Company aims to determine demand for TLDs, and help connect early registrants with participating registries.
Domain company D3 has launched Frontier, a platform that could help registrants get first dibs on new top level domains when they begin to roll out.
Through Frontier, D3 hopes to identify which TLDs will be most popular and help registrants get domains on those TLDs before they’re generally available.
To facilitate this, users pledge Frontier points in two phases.
First, they pledge points at the TLD level to show which extensions interest them most.
Later, name-level selection will open for participating TLDs. At that point, a user selects a second level domain, commits points, and sets a first-year registration price they’re willing to pay for the domain.
If the user who submitted the most points for a second level domain has posted a price that meets or exceeds the registry’s ask for the domain, the domain will be awarded to that user at that price after Sunrise. Otherwise, it goes to the next higher point-committer until it finds one that meets the registry’s asking price. (It’s a double-blind system; the registry doesn’t see the “bids” before submitting the minimum it will accept.)
D3 calls this period after Sunrise the Frontier Registration Period. It is designed as a Limited Registration Period under the ICANN startup process and occurs only after all required Sunrise allocations and registrations are completed. The idea is that the Frontier period would take place before any Early Access Phase and general availability.
Users earn points for signing up, depositing crypto at various third-party vaults, and potentially through other actions, like referrals.
As of this morning, the top extension by far is .agent, which has captured 64% of all points. Unsurprisingly, given the crypto tie-in, many crypto-related domains such as .sol, .mask, and .sui make the top ten.
It’s important to note that the registries that will end up operating these TLDs have not necessarily agreed to work with the Frontier platform at this point. During the first phase, Frontier hopes to identify where demand is highest.
As an unstoppabledomains.com whale, I’m livid that UD lied to it’s community about pursuing .crypto and many other TLDs they originally created on web3. Now, this piece of sh8t company D3, is pinning us all against each other making us pay just to get in the line to buy the assets, then maybe have a chance at the asset. How is this legal, D3 just gets to create the line out of thin air and charge us for it?
You’re misunderstanding what d3 is doing. Each registry operator gets to decide how their domains are allocated. If the winner of .crypto wants to work with d3 they can, but they don’t have to.
It’s still entertaining to watch the rubes fall for this stuff the same way they did all the way back to the 2000 new TLD round.
It’s amusing how the domainosphere uncritically echoes these press releases with complete amnesia….
ICANN, 2000:
September 29, 2000 — Commenting on the process for establishing new top-level domain names (TLDs) the Names Council of the Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO) emphasizes that no new TLDs have been selected as of this date and no one is authorized to pre-register names.
Noting that some companies are claiming to offer pre-registration services to consumers who may wish to register in the new TLDs, the Names Council has issued the following statement. “The Names Council feels it is premature for companies to offer pre-registration services for domain names in speculative new TLDs. To date, no new TLDs have been selected and there is no guarantee that any particular organization will be authorized to take registrations for any particular TLD. The registration of names in new TLDs will be done on a fair basis, and the practice of pre-registration should not be encouraged.”
ICANN, 2013:
Many of the advertisements are touting “pre-registration” as a means of securing your desired domain name, and some Registrars are reporting a high volume of pre-registrations. Clearly, this is welcome news for new Registries and the Domain Name Industry as a whole. However, we feel it is our responsibility to convey a note of caution for anyone pre-registering a domain.
….here we go again.
“Users earn points for signing up, depositing crypto at various third-party vaults, and potentially through other actions…” Like generating more churn at Doma?