.mai
Is .mai a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.mai is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Deqing County Jinghong Entrepreneur Service Center. Beijing Guoxu Network Technology Co., Ltd. named .mai as a backup string for its .pop application. ICANN deactivated it, because another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup.
A short pinyin-flavoured ending (buy/sell) that may sell on price in China but is unlikely to become a brand signal anyone recognises.
chinese-market small merchants and resellers reading it as pinyin for buy/sell, plus a small fringe reading it as "m-ai" for AI-flavoured side projects
Named on the ICANN gTLD application list, 7 October 2026 as a replacement (backup) string of the applicant's .pop application, shown as deactivated: another applicant applied for the same string or named it as a backup
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 as .mai read as a personal name: a short, un-English, three-letter string that is a common given name/surname in Asian markets, sold as an open namespace where the registrant's own identity — not a category or a company — is what the label carries, so it only works if individuals will pay to spell their name at the right of the dot.
A short romanized CJK syllable with no English meaning, monetizable only to the one language audience that hears a word (surname/'net') in it — the same language-ambiguity bet .mai makes, differing mainly in that .wang's buyer pool is a single market rather than the several that read 'mai'.
Another three-letter transliterated syllable taken as a generic open registry: no category to anchor demand, so the wager is purely that the sound is short, pronounceable and name-like enough across languages for registrants to project meaning onto it — structurally identical to .mai, with a comparable risk that it reads as an arbitrary acronym to everyone else.
What a .mai domain is
.mai is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .mai domain extension real yet?
.mai 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 .mai domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .mai name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .mai was .kim, delegated on 23 January 2014.
Is .mai a real TLD?
Not yet. .mai is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .mai is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
“DCJE2552-T43314 · Deqing County Jinghong Entrepreneur Service Center · primary”ICANN
“BGNT2696T-T98747 · Beijing Guoxu Network Technology Co., Ltd. · replacement string of .pop · Deactivated DCJE2552-T43314 · Deqing County Jinghong Entrepreneur Service Center · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited, at its bottom. The string's natural reading is the pinyin syllable mai, which in Mandarin covers buy, sell and wheat depending on tone, so it is a plausible commerce ending for a Chinese-speaking buyer and, secondarily, can be pitched as m-ai (my AI) to a fringe of AI side projects. By analogy with the pinyin and China-marketed strings of the 2012 round (.wang, .ren, .xin, .top style endings), such strings tend to register at volume when registrars discount them, with weak primary-identity use and a thin aftermarket; that is the defining pattern of this band and why I do not place it in 50-69, where sustained demand and genuine primary-identity use would be needed and nothing in the record or analogy suggests either. It is not in 10-29 because the string has a real everyday meaning for a very large language community and is short, which gives it a realistic path to price-driven volume rather than purely event-driven vanity. The record shows one confirmed application by Deqing County Jinghong Entrepreneur Service Center under the Applicant Support Program, and a deactivated second application that had listed .mai as a replacement string for .pop; I use the applicant facts only to note that a county-level entrepreneur service center is a smaller launch base than the large registrars behind the 2012 pinyin strings, which lowers expected distribution reach but does not change the string's own ceiling. Main market uncertainty: whether Chinese registrar channels adopt it as a discounted volume string at all, and whether the tonal ambiguity of mai reads as broad appeal or as no clear meaning to buyers; the .pop-replacement history also hints the string was a fallback choice rather than a demand-led one, flagged as inference.