.mooncake
Is .mooncake a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .mooncake, 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 seasonal-festival pastry name: charming for holiday marketing pages, but too narrow and episodic to be anyone's main web address.
bakeries, confectionery brands, and food e-commerce sellers in Greater China and the Chinese diaspora running Mid-Autumn Festival campaigns; occasionally hospitality brands doing seasonal gifting promotions
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The pastry that unites families at the Mid-Autumn Festival.”
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 single named foodstuff whose registrant pool is the trade that makes and sells that one item, betting that bakers/shops will move primary identity onto the dish name rather than their own brand — mooncake is the narrower, seasonal, single-culture version of the same wager.
Also a single culturally-originated consumable product noun aimed at a small producer trade plus gifting/premium retail, where the string works only if a specific product category is strong enough to anchor identity for makers who already have well-known house brands.
Structurally the same object — a hyper-specific pantry-item noun rather than a category like .food — but its realistic registrant base collapses to a handful of manufacturers, so it tests how thin a single-product string can be cut, which is mooncake's central risk too.
What a .mooncake domain is
.mooncake 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 .mooncake today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .mooncake domain extension real yet?
.mooncake 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 .mooncake domain?
You can’t yet. A .mooncake 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 .mooncake was .pizza, delegated on 27 August 2014.
Is .mooncake a real TLD?
Not yet. .mooncake is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .mooncake 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
“.mooncake · Cuisine · “The pastry that unites families at the Mid-Autumn Festival.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 10-29 (vanity/narrow). Mooncakes anchor a real annual commercial gifting season in Chinese-speaking markets, so there is genuine but sharply seasonal demand — campaign microsites and bakery promos, not year-round primary identities. By analogy (flagged as analogy), broad cuisine TLDs like .pizza or .cafe achieved only modest niche adoption despite covering everyday categories; a single festival pastry is far narrower, and the Latin-script string sits awkwardly against a market whose buyers brand primarily in Chinese, which caps organic uptake further. It is not band 30-49 because there is no plausible volume-registration or defensive case sustaining year-round demand, and not band 1-9 because the festival's commercial scale makes some seasonal registrations by bakeries and marketers realistic within 5 years. Main market uncertainty: whether Greater-China food brands will use a Latin-script novelty TLD for seasonal campaigns at all, versus keeping traffic on marketplaces and social platforms where that commerce already lives.