.weiqi
Is .weiqi a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .weiqi, 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 hobby-niche TLD for the game of Go; the small global community may register some, but few serious sites would make it their main address.
weiqi/Go clubs, teaching platforms, and online game servers, mostly in China and East Asia, plus hobbyist fan sites and player blogs worldwide
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The ancient strategy game also known as Go.”
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: the uncontrolled proper name of one specific game, sold to the clubs, tournaments, teaching sites and online servers whose entire identity is that single game, with no company or federation owning the word.
Same structural bet on a single named discipline with a devoted but non-universal following anchored by federations and clubs, though it is a mass spectator sport rather than a niche mind game.
Same language-endonym bet — picking one linguistic community's word for a game that other communities call something else (go, baduk, igo), so the addressable market is capped by which name the player base actually types.
What a .weiqi domain is
.weiqi 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 .weiqi today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .weiqi domain extension real yet?
.weiqi 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 .weiqi domain?
You can’t yet. A .weiqi 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 .weiqi was .poker, delegated on 15 October 2014.
Is .weiqi a real TLD?
Not yet. .weiqi is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .weiqi 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
“.weiqi · Martial & Strategy · “The ancient strategy game also known as Go.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Band 10-29 (vanity/narrow): weiqi is the Chinese name for Go, a game with a devoted but small worldwide community, so demand over the next 5 years is shallow and hobby-driven. It sits above the 1-9 band because real registrants plausibly exist — clubs, teaching sites, game servers, and fans — but below 30-49 because the string is a pinyin romanization that English speakers call 'go' and Korean speakers call 'baduk', splitting even the tiny addressable market, and by analogy with other single-game and hobby TLDs (e.g. gambling- or game-themed strings), such spaces have tended toward low registration volume and negligible aftermarket (analogy, figures unknown). Chinese-market users, the natural core, have historically favored .cn, .com, or platform apps over Latin-script niche TLDs (analogy). The applicant is a Beijing-based portfolio applicant with 323 submitted strings, consistent with a speculative catalog play rather than a community-anchored registry, which tempers adoption likelihood. Main market uncertainty: whether any major Chinese weiqi platform or the AI-Go ecosystem would adopt the string as a primary identity, which would lift it toward the top of its band.