.lei
Is .lei a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.lei is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is GLEIF.
A technical identity namespace for registered legal entities; useful for verification, not an address anyone builds a brand on.
legal entities that hold a Legal Entity Identifier, and the compliance, financial-reporting and verification systems that need to resolve a company's identity in a machine-readable way
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 almost exactly: a short acronym for a globally issued entity-identifier code, where the registry is the body that issues the code and the registrants are the legal entities already carrying it, so the namespace only works if the identifier itself is treated as authoritative infrastructure rather than a brand.
An acronym whose entire value rests on being the one standards-setting institution behind those letters, run as a restricted namespace for its own ecosystem — the same "authority-owned initialism as registry" bet, though its buyers are members and working groups rather than identified entities.
The bet is a verified-identity namespace where eligibility checks and a vetting authority are the product, not the word — the same proposition of selling verifiable entity identity, but as a generic English trust-mark rather than an acronym an issuing body already owns.
What a .lei domain is
.lei is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Infrastructure. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .lei domain extension real yet?
.lei 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 .lei domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .lei name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .lei was .duns, delegated on 23 July 2016.
Is .lei a real TLD?
Not yet. .lei is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .lei is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- GLEIF · first recordedICANN
“GLEI2667T-T86308 · Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow). The string .lei reads, in its applicant's context, as the Legal Entity Identifier: the verified-facts block records a single confirmed standard application from GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation), with .gleif recorded as a replacement string naming this one as primary. The natural use is an identifier namespace in which an entity's LEI record, or a verifiable credential tied to it, resolves under a predictable domain, so the value is end-use utility for compliance and counterparty verification, not brand. The string's other meanings (a Hawaiian garland, the plural of the Romanian currency unit, an Italian pronoun) are real but unlikely to drive serious primary-identity registrations. It is not in the 30-49 band because registrations would not happen at volume on price or on brand signal: a serious company would not present company.lei as its public identity when it already has a .com or ccTLD, and an identifier-keyed namespace has essentially no aftermarket. It is not in the 1-9 band because a genuine, if narrow, institutional market exists by analogy: the operator already administers a global population of identifier holders, and gated infrastructure namespaces run by sector bodies (by analogy to .bank and .insurance, which draw low but sustained verified registrations) show that such a space can function for its purpose without ever being a consumer web address. The main market uncertainty is whether .lei is run as an open registration space where LEI holders choose human-readable labels (which would lift utility toward the 30s) or as a closed, code-keyed technical namespace with no discretionary registration at all (which would push it toward the floor of this band). Volume figures, pricing and the operator's launch policy are unknown and I have not asserted any.