.proton
Is .proton a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.proton is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is PROTON TECHNOLOGIES LTD.
A company-owned namespace: useful to the applicant for its own products, but not something outsiders can buy or trade.
the applicant company itself, for first-party product, account and support addresses it fully controls; no third-party buyers
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: a plain everyday noun with no commercial owner in the dictionary, claimed by the maker of a mass-market consumer software product so that its product name becomes the namespace, which only works if the company's brand meaning outweighs the ordinary word.
Same bet of taking a generic non-commercial word (a color) as the identity of a subscription tech service, where the applicant is defending a brand reading of a common word rather than a category.
Same bet at corporate rather than product level: an ordinary dictionary word that is the company's own legal name, applied for as a single-registrant brand space by a tech firm that must own the word's commercial sense.
What a .proton domain is
.proton is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Brand. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .proton domain extension real yet?
.proton 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 .proton domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .proton name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .proton was .chrome, delegated on 15 September 2014.
Is .proton a real TLD?
Not yet. .proton is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .proton is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- PROTON TECHNOLOGIES LTD · first recordedICANN
“PTL2687T-T18174 · PROTON TECHNOLOGIES LTD · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The record shows a single confirmed application of ICANN type "brand" from PROTON TECHNOLOGIES LTD, so under the assumption of delegation this is a closed, operator-only namespace: addresses are not sold, so there is no registration market and no aftermarket, and value to a buyer reduces to the applicant's own internal utility. It is not in the 30-49 band because that band presumes registrations at volume or on price to outside parties, which a brand TLD by design does not offer; the brand signal is strong only for the one owner. It is not in the 1-9 band because, by analogy with other operator-run brand TLDs (flagged as analogy), a privacy- and security-positioned software company has a plausible primary-identity use: it can host product, login and support pages under a namespace it alone controls, which carries a real anti-phishing and trust benefit for an email and account-focused service. The string is also a common scientific word used by unrelated businesses, which limits how cleanly the TLD reads as one brand outside the applicant's existing audience, though that matters little for a closed namespace. Main market uncertainty: whether the operator actually moves customer-facing services onto the namespace as primary identity (as a minority of brand TLDs have, by analogy) or leaves it as a defensive, redirect-only holding, which is the more common outcome among brand TLDs by analogy. Counts, dates and launch mechanics beyond the record are unknown.