.yiwu
Is .yiwu a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .yiwu, 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 niche web address tied to Yiwu, China's small-goods trading hub — meaningful to wholesalers there, invisible to almost everyone else.
wholesale merchants, sourcing agents, and cross-border e-commerce sellers connected to Yiwu's commodity markets, plus city-affiliated institutions and trade-services firms wanting a location-branded address
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The city that supplies the world's small goods.”
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 second-tier Chinese city whose name is really a trade/manufacturing brand, applied for by local municipal-registry interests betting that thousands of local SME exporters will move their primary identity onto the city name rather than a national .cn or .com.
Also a Chinese-city geo run as a commerce identity (Canton Fair trade gateway), but as a provincial-capital megacity it is a general-purpose civic namespace serving every sector, where the target's whole case rests on one concentrated wholesale-market industry.
Same buyer and same municipal-geo mechanics — a Chinese city string sold to local businesses as a location-of-origin credential — but the identity it trades on is tech/manufacturing prestige at megacity scale rather than a single-market goods-sourcing reputation.
What a .yiwu domain is
.yiwu is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Places. Nobody is chasing .yiwu today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .yiwu domain extension real yet?
.yiwu 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 .yiwu domain?
You can’t yet. A .yiwu 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 .yiwu was .佛山, delegated on 14 August 2014.
Is .yiwu a real TLD?
Not yet. .yiwu is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .yiwu 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
“.yiwu · Trade & Logistics · “The city that supplies the world's small goods.””Journey To The West Corporation
- I place .yiwu in the 10-29 band (score 22). Yiwu has genuine global recognition in wholesale trade, which keeps it out of the 1-9 no-market band: a sourcing agent or market stallholder could plausibly want a yiwu-branded address. It does not reach the 30-49 band because, by analogy with existing Chinese city/geo TLDs and with Western city TLDs, city extensions have seen limited primary-identity use, and Chinese SMEs in particular default to mainstream extensions like .com and .cn; a Latin-script pinyin city string also faces China's regulatory hosting-approval regime, which has historically throttled local use of new gTLDs (qualitative, from analogy — I assert no figures). The applicant is a Beijing-based portfolio applicant with 323 submitted strings per its published catalog, which reads as a broad portfolio strategy rather than a bid anchored by the city or its market operator — neutral on the string, but it lowers the odds of the concentrated local promotion that geo TLDs typically need. Main market uncertainty: whether Yiwu's municipal government or the operator of its trade market ecosystem endorses and actively distributes the TLD to the merchant base, which is the one channel that could push it toward the 30-49 band.