.bitcoin
Is .bitcoin a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.bitcoin is contested: 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are Identity Digital and Wiz.
Who is applying, and what they run today
One of the two already run TLDs, 14.80M names between them. One runs one of .bitcoin's closest 2012 strings: Identity Digital .forex. Wiz runs none.
Will names sell?
A credible badge for verified Bitcoin builders; restricted registration makes it a trusted niche identity, not a broad market.
Last round the AI scored the 2012 strings blind to their fate. Strings it scored 60 or more hold a median 27,168 names today; those under 30, a median of 30. .bitcoin’s closest 2012 strings hold .frogans 10 and .forex 1K.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .frogans, held 10 names, June 2026. .forex held 1,350. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet on a proper-noun protocol name: the TLD is worth nothing on its own linguistic merit and everything on one specific network achieving adoption, so the registry is underwriting a technology's success rather than selling a category word.
- .islam
Same bet on monetizing a collective identifier that no legal entity owns, where the hard question is not demand but standing — whether any applicant has a mandate from a decentralized community to gatekeep its own name.
Same buyer profile — exchanges, brokers and trading shops putting primary identity on the asset class they deal in — but the string is a market-category generic rather than the proper name of a single ownerless network, which is where most of .bitcoin's risk actually sits.
verified Bitcoin stakeholders and infrastructure operators — node operators, protocol contributors, and developers who want a primary identity that signals authentic standing in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
What a .bitcoin domain is
.bitcoin is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Crypto category. 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .bitcoin domain extension real yet?
.bitcoin is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .bitcoin domain?
You can’t yet. A .bitcoin name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .bitcoin was .frogans, delegated on 19 April 2014.
Is .bitcoin a real TLD?
Not yet. .bitcoin is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .bitcoin is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Identity Digital · first recordedICANN
- Wiz · now confirmedICANN
- Wiz · fact corrected
- Wiz · first recordedWiz & Associates (@wiz) on X
“BPL2623T-T40052 · Bird Pepper, LLC · primary · contention set 2026-27 WASD2698T-T81921 · Wiz & Associates, S.A. de C.V. · primary · contention set 2026-27”ICANN
“We successfully submitted the ICANN .bitcoin TLD application for Community Priority Evaluation with over 50+ letters of endorsement from within the community, together with several high-level letters of recognition. ICANN will reveal our full application sometime in November 2026”Wiz & Associates (@wiz) on X
“Wiz, the operator behind the popular Bitcoin block explorer mempool.space, has filed a community priority application with ICANN to secure the .bitcoin top-level domain.”Crypto Briefing
- Band: strong niche (50-69). Not the band above: per the application's stated intent, registration would be restricted to verifiably involved Bitcoin stakeholders and infrastructure operators, which deliberately caps registration volume and aftermarket liquidity, so even with more than 50 community endorsement letters on record it is unlikely to become a category-wide primary-identity default across crypto within 5 years. Not the band below: the string carries strong recognition, and by analogy with restricted, verification-gated TLDs (such as the banking-sector model), an eligibility gate can convert scarcity into a genuine trust signal — anti-phishing value for wallets, explorers, and node infrastructure — supporting real primary-identity use rather than price-driven volume; also by analogy, open crypto-themed namespaces have tended toward speculative demand that faded, a dynamic a verified registry trades away along with scale. The applicant's operation of mempool.space and role as a Bitcoin DNS seed operator are neutral facts that raise adoption likelihood among the eligible cohort, since the registry would be run from inside the community it serves. Main market uncertainty: whether established Bitcoin projects actually migrate their primary identities to .bitcoin over the next 5 years or keep their existing, entrenched domains and treat .bitcoin as a secondary badge.