.qilin
Is .qilin a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .qilin, 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 mythical-creature name with cultural charm but almost no businesses that would make it their main web address.
chinese-culture-themed brands, games, and fantasy projects that use the qilin motif, plus a handful of companies named Qilin in pinyin
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The benevolent creature said to herald greatness.”
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 mythical creature with no real-world constituency, so no category of businesses must own it and no community can claim it, leaving the registry to manufacture demand purely on connotation (rarity, luck, prestige) for whoever wants an evocative badge.
Same bet of taking a culturally loaded East Asian figure, rendering it in Latin script, and selling it globally as an attitude word to registrants with no literal claim to it, so success rides on the connotation traveling outside its home culture rather than on a defined registrant pool.
Same bet on one nation's iconic cultural symbol carrying enough emotional weight to anchor identities, with the same unresolved ambiguity between reading as a corporate brand and as an open cultural word, and the same dependence on a single culture's audience for volume.
What a .qilin domain is
.qilin 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 .qilin today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .qilin domain extension real yet?
.qilin 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 .qilin domain?
You can’t yet. A .qilin name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens.
Is .qilin a real TLD?
Not yet. .qilin is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .qilin 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
“.qilin · Zodiac & Creatures · “The benevolent creature said to herald greatness.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 10-29 (vanity/narrow): the qilin is a recognizable auspicious creature in Chinese culture, and some companies and game titles use the name, so a thin motif-driven demand pool exists — but the pinyin form is rarely a primary identity outside China, and inside China Latin-script niche TLDs have historically seen weak primary-identity use (analogy to other culture-word gTLDs, which registered thin volumes and almost no serious primary sites). It is not band 30-49 because there is no plausible volume or price-play registration base for a single creature word, and not band 1-9 because the word carries genuine brand resonance and a nonzero set of Qilin-named ventures could adopt it. The applicant's large multi-string portfolio (facts block) suggests a catalog play rather than a community-backed launch, which by analogy tends to correlate with low marketing push per string. Main market uncertainty: whether any Chinese brand or game franchise named Qilin would adopt a Latin-script niche TLD as primary identity rather than .com/.cn.