.dan
Is .dan a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .dan, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A vanity address for martial artists and people named Dan; charming, but rarely a serious project's main web identity.
martial-arts schools, instructors and ranked practitioners wanting a rank-themed address, plus vanity buyers named Dan and hobby communities (judo, karate, go) building small sites
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The rank earned through years of mastery.”
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet exactly: a short, common personal name sold as an identity space whose buyers are the individuals and families who already carry the name, so it lives or dies on vanity name-holder volume, not category demand.
Identical mechanic of monetizing a widely-held personal name by selling people their own name as a namespace, but pointed at a Chinese surname population with a secondary common-word meaning, so the buyer pool and go-to-market differ from a short Western given name.
Shares the wager on individual self-identity registrations rather than business or category use, but it is a pronoun anyone may adopt instead of a name that pre-selects its own buyers, so the addressable pool is defined by intent rather than by who you are.
What a .dan domain is
.dan is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. Nobody is chasing .dan today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .dan domain extension real yet?
.dan is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .dan domain?
You can’t yet. A .dan 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 .dan was .kim, delegated on 23 January 2014.
Is .dan a real TLD?
Not yet. .dan is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .dan and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.dan · Martial & Strategy · “The rank earned through years of mastery.””Journey To The West Corporation
- I place .dan in the 10-29 vanity/narrow band, at 19. The string carries two meanings: the dan rank in martial arts and board games, and the common given name Dan. Both drive registrations that are memorable rather than mission-critical — by analogy with hobby-themed gTLDs like .ninja and .yoga, which achieved real registration counts (figures unknown) but little primary-identity use among serious businesses, and with personal-name-adjacent TLDs like .dad, which by analogy have stayed shallow vanity namespaces. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no evident volume driver — no registrar channel habit, no pricing story known, and martial-arts organizations overwhelmingly brand on .com or country codes; it is above the 1-9 band because the dual meaning (rank + first name) gives it a genuine, if small, global pool of emotionally motivated buyers. The applicant is a Beijing-based portfolio applicant with a published catalog of 323 submitted strings, which I read neutrally as a broad speculative catalog rather than a community-anchored bid; that suggests generic-registry marketing rather than federation-driven adoption. Main market uncertainty: whether the given-name angle (Dan) can be marketed into meaningful vanity volume in English-speaking markets, which would push it toward the top of the band.