.tofu
Is .tofu a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .tofu, 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 playful single-food web ending with a tiny plant-based niche; few serious businesses would make it their main address.
plant-based and vegan food brands, tofu makers, Asian-cuisine restaurants and food bloggers wanting a quirky, memorable address; hobbyists picking it up as a joke or vanity name
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Humble bean curd, endlessly versatile.”
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 single, narrowly-defined consumable product noun whose registrant pool is producers, importers and category enthusiasts rather than a broad SMB population, so it lives or dies on whether one product category is identity-worthy enough to move people off .com.
Same bet: one specific food item as the whole namespace, sold to the makers and sellers of that item who would put their primary storefront identity on the food itself.
Same kind of string and job — a single foodstuff generic aimed at craft producers plus a culture of evangelists — but its buyer base is an order of magnitude larger and longer-established than a plant-protein staple's, so the volume assumption is much safer.
What a .tofu domain is
.tofu is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody is chasing .tofu today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .tofu domain extension real yet?
.tofu 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 .tofu domain?
You can’t yet. A .tofu 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 .tofu was .vodka, delegated on 31 March 2014.
Is .tofu a real TLD?
Not yet. .tofu is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .tofu 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
“.tofu · Cuisine · “Humble bean curd, endlessly versatile.””Journey To The West Corporation
- By analogy (flagged as such), narrow single-food TLDs such as .pizza, .coffee, and .recipes have historically produced thin registration bases, weak brand signal, and shallow aftermarkets, and .tofu addresses a still-narrower food item, so sustained primary-identity use over the next 5 years looks unlikely outside a handful of plant-based or specialty-food brands. The plant-based food trend gives it a real but small pool of best-fit buyers, and the word's secondary tech meaning (the nickname for missing-glyph boxes in fonts) adds novelty appeal without adding commercial demand. This places it in the 10-29 vanity/narrow band: above 1-9 because a genuine, identifiable niche exists, but below 30-49 because there is no evidence of volume registration dynamics or a price-driven mass market for so specific a string. The applicant is a portfolio filer with a published list of 323 submitted strings, which suggests registry-level marketing attention per string may be spread thin, tempering adoption likelihood. Main market uncertainty: whether the plant-based branding wave gives niche food TLDs materially more traction than the earlier food-TLD generation achieved.