Securing Generic Top-Level Domains for the Cardano Ecosystem

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Securing Generic Top-Level Domains for the Cardano Ecosystem - Social
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As the Cardano ecosystem expands and matures, it’s crucial to strengthen its presence wherever new opportunities arise. One such opportunity is the upcoming application window for registering new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs, such as .org or .xyz) with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), opening in Q1 2026.

During this window, applications for new gTLDs will be possible for the first time since 2012. In the interest of Cardano, the Cardano Foundation plans to apply for the registration of the .ada and .cardano gTLDs. We will use only our own financial resources for this. If we are successful, securing these gTLDs will allow anyone in the Cardano ecosystem to procure corresponding domains (such as vespr.ada or nmkr.cardano).

The Cardano Foundation has been diligently scoping this project since 2023, when the new ICANN application window was announced. A multi-disciplinary team of experts has shaped the initiative. This process involved consulting with community experts and evaluating vendors to secure optimal support for both the upcoming application preparation and the future operational management of the gTLDs. We are excited by the potential and want to shout out in particular to Pi, Patrick and Chris for their contributions.

In this post we (1) explore the gTLD opportunity, (2) explain why we believe it is of strategic importance, (3) outline our principles for administering the gTLDs for the benefit of the Cardano ecosystem, (4) describe the process to invite community support, and (5) estimate the costs covered by CF.

1. New gTLD Application Window

In the Web2 world, ICANN, a non-profit organization, plays a crucial role in maintaining the stability and security of the internet’s unique identifiers. Specifically, ICANN coordinates the assignment of domain names, IP addresses, and protocol parameters, ensuring that the global network remains interoperable.

The upcoming gTLDs application window invites applications for new gTLDs, and allows for the introduction of novel domain extensions, thereby influencing the future landscape of online identity and navigation.

The application process as set out in the Applicant Guidebook, requires applicants to demonstrate technical and operational capabilities, alongside a clear strategic vision for their proposed gTLD. ICANN has emphasized the importance of community-based applications, encouraging groups to collaborate and propose gTLDs that serve specific communities of interest. While there is no guarantee of success in the gTLD application process, we strongly believe that it is a risk worth taking.

2. Why Apply for .ada and .cardano gTLDs?

The Cardano Foundation’s application for the .ada and .cardano gTLDs serves several purposes:

  • Ensure a competitive digital presence for Cardano: In securing both .cardano and .ada, we would increase visibility and strengthen our presence in the digital space while boosting trust and credibility for projects built on Cardano.
  • Unlock innovations for Cardano: Being able to use .ada and .cardano domains will allow the Cardano ecosystem builders and users to leverage them for innovations and bridging of the Web2 to Web3 divide. Examples could include:
    • simplified wallet addresses;
    • integration with decentralized identity solutions like Veridian;
    • domain tokenisation.

The Cardano Foundation is also in conversation with Ada Handles and Handshake to explore use cases that bridge traditional DNS and Cardano.

  • Strategically position Cardano as a digital infrastructure: The new gTLDs would provide an additional utility layer to the Cardano blockchain and unlock the potential for new integrations and use cases, increasing the overall attractiveness of Cardano.

3. How will the Cardano Foundation administer the .ada and .cardano gTLDs

To ensure that the .ada and .cardano gTLDs are operated in the interest of the ecosystem and community, the Cardano Foundation is committed to regularly publishing figures on the gTLDs’ operation, as we already do with all our financial data. Depending on the market interest in the new gTLDs, there is a possibility that, in time, we will be able to use returns to support other ecosystem activities.

Furthermore, the Cardano Foundation plans to establish a dedicated Community Advisory Group to guide the management and development of the gTLDs. Such a Group will ensure that the gTLDs are operated in accordance with the principles set out in “Our Cardano” and duly facilitate collaboration with existing projects in the Cardano ecosystem.

4. Info Action for Community Support

Thanks to the Cardano ecosystem governance mechanisms, we have the unique opportunity to assess community sentiment and support for this initiative. For this purpose, and to simultaneously show community endorsement for purposes of the gTLDs application, the Cardano Foundation is submitting an Info Action. Please cast your vote.

If the Info Action passes, the Cardano Foundation will prepare, pay for and submit an application for both gTLDs with ICANN in Q1 2026.

5. Estimated Costs and Resources

Below is a breakdown of the estimated rough budget to apply for and operate the new gTLDs. Please note that the Cardano Foundation is not requesting Treasury funds for this project. The cost of all resources will be covered directly by the Cardano Foundation.

One-Time Costs

  • Two gTLD Applications: Est. $700,000
    • ICANN application fees: Est. $500,000
    • Application support: Est. $200,000

Annual Fixed Costs

  • Annual fixed costs: Est. $350,000
    • ICANN fees, Registry Software Maintenance, and Licensing: Est. $100,000
    • Marketing, Business Development, and Overhead: Est. $250,000

Annual Variable Costs

Variable costs are not included in the above figures, as they depend on domain sales volume and will be offset by domain sales revenue.

6. To Conclude

The upcoming ICANN application window represents a unique opportunity for the Cardano ecosystem. By pursuing the .ada and .cardano gTLDs applications, the Cardano Foundation plans to expand Cardano’s infrastructure’s capabilities, solidify its competitive edge and digital presence, foster innovation, and ensure that these critical assets are managed for the benefit of the entire Cardano ecosystem and community.

We hope the Cardano community will support this initiative and we ask all SPOs and DReps to vote YES for this Info Action to support us in shaping the future of Cardano.

FAQ

1. What is the Cardano Foundation planning to do regarding Top-Level Domains (gTLDs)?

The Cardano Foundation plans to apply for the registration of the .ada and .cardano gTLDs with ICANN.

2. When is the next application window for new gTLDs expected to open?

The next application window for new gTLDs is anticipated to open in Q1 2026.

3. Why is the Cardano Foundation pursuing the .ada and .cardano gTLDs?

The initiative aims to ensure a robust digital presence for Cardano and strategically develop Cardano as a digital infrastructure, by adding an additional infrastructure layer to it.

4. How will securing these gTLDs benefit the Cardano ecosystem?

It will enhance digital identity, prevent brand misuse, build trust, and unlock innovative use cases such as simplified wallet addresses (“yourname.ada”), integration with decentralized identity solutions, and offer the possibility of domain tokenization.

5. Why is the Cardano Foundation considered best suited to apply for these gTLDs?

The Cardano Foundation is a non-profit organization committed to managing the gTLDs for the ecosystem’s benefit, as it has been doing with other Cardano public goods such as the Cardano trademarks. In addition, it possesses the resources, the technical know-how and the community reach to manage this project.

6. How will the Cardano Foundation administer the .ada and .cardano gTLDs?

The Foundation will regularly publish statistics and financials about the gTLDs operation, and will establish a Community Advisory Group to guide gTLDs management and development.

7. Will the Cardano Foundation be using Cardano Treasury funds for this project?

No, the Cardano Foundation will cover all costs directly with its own financial resources and will not ask for Cardano Treasury funds.

8. What are the estimated one-time costs for applying for the gTLDs?

The estimated one-time costs for two gTLD applications are USD 700,000, which includes ICANN application fees (USD 500,000) and application support fees (USD 200,000).

9. What are the estimated annual fixed costs for operating the gTLDs?

The estimated annual fixed costs are USD 100,000 for ICANN fees, registry software maintenance, and licensing, and USD 250,000 for marketing, business Development, and overhead, totaling USD 350,000 annually.

10. Why is the Cardano Foundation submitting an Info Action for this project?

The Cardano Foundation is submitting an Info Action to assess the community support for this initiative. The Info Action will also serve as proof of community endorsement in the context of the gTLDs application.

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I voted no on this info action with the following recorded reason:

“Cardano Foundation asserts that it operates independently of the community and its board members are not elected or appointed by the Cardano community. Cardano Foundation’s decision making process lacks transparency. IntersectMBO is a better entity to manage these top-level domains.”

I have subsequently been approached by Markus from CF over Matrix chat (Element) to further explain my reasons so I have re-directed any discussion into the open here.

I think my reasons are pretty obvious from reading my on-chain vote context. But for further context it is worth reviewing this post. From that discussion it is clear that I started out with the view that Cardano Foundation was a not for profit organisation that was effectively governed by the community, for the benefit of the community, and that they would always act in the best interests of the community. However I was proved wrong! The various assumptions that I had made about the governance of Cardano Foundation were shown to be incorrect.

It concerns me that Cardano Foundation gets its board members voted by the Swiss government and that Cardano Foundation employees have openly confirmed that they are not mandated to act in the best interests of the community. Cardano Foundation employees have already taken actions that have upset the community and do not have widespread community support such as their recent heavy handed voting on Catalyst fund 13 proposals which dictated the outcome. In Catalyst Fund 13, CF voted 180 million ADA. The sheer scale of CF’s voting power was equivalent to the total votes in the most voted category of the previous fund. This was disproportionate and undermined the principles of decentralised governance.

Then there are my posts in relation to the CF stake pool delegation strategy which rendered meaningless the concept of the K parameter and undermined community push-back against multi-pool operation. See the following posts:

Consequently I would prefer that these top level domains are managed by an independent not-for-profit entity that is effectively governed by the community. IE: That does have its executives voted by the community and is mandated to act in the best interests of the community.

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So, since there are no such entities you effectively voted to not have top level Cardano domains, period.
Since Intersect doesn’t qualify under ICANN standards, nor does it have a mandate to do so.

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Hi CF!

I’m very much in favor of this endeavor. I just have a few questions.

  1. Will you be coordinating with community projects like AdaHandle, who are already working on decentralized domain initiatives, to harmonize the ways that users can register .ada and .cardano domains?

  2. Will you be giving the Community Advisory Group a high level of autonomy in the way that they make decisions for gTLD policy, or will policy be set by CF leadership?

  3. Who will receive profits from domain registrations? Will it be the CF or could this be an inflow to the Cardano Treasury?

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It is not the CF’s fault that you didn’t understand how foundations in Switzerland (and pretty large parts of continental Europe) work.

That’s just a lie.

Parts of the community, i.e., the Cardano social media mob.

IntersectMBO is not better suited. It is not governed by “the community”, just by its paying members.

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Thank you all for your questions and contributions.

My name is Nicolas and I am the CLO here at CF. As this project has been my quest for the past two years, I will try to answer as many as possible. There will also be two public calls for Q&A next week, links below:

I won’t be discussing topics like general sentiment towards CF, historical decisions or how we are governed, these points have been covered extensively elsewhere. We appreciate that it will never be possible to make everyone happy and as such, some people will not support what we do. That’s a natural consequence of a permissionless infrastructure and community.

Onwards to the gTLD related questions:

  1. Would it not be better if an independant, not-for-profit entity effectively governed by the community would administer the gTLDs?

CF is a not for profit and we do believe we look at anything we do through the lense of benefiting the Cardano infrastructure and ecosystem. But we are also a Swiss foundation bound to an existing governance model, which does not foresee membership based board elections. If that is a reason for someone to vote against this project being executed by us, then so be it. Diversity of opinions is why many of work in this space!

It may however be worth pointing out that by that strict criterium, no organisation within the Cardano ecosystem would be able to submit this application to ICANN, leaving the opportunity unused (assuming “governed by the community” means governed directly by all ada holders as defined in the constitution). And that is before we get into needing an organisation that can meet ICANN requirements (the application form alone is 235 pages, just as an example).

  1. Will you be coordinating with community projects like AdaHandle, who are already working on decentralized domain initiatives, to harmonize the ways that users can register .ada and .cardano domains?

Yes, as mentioned in the post above, we are already in conversations with Handshake and AdaHandle. Now practically, doing anything concrete with anyone on this project is likely a 2027/2028 topic, as it will likely take at least a year until and TLD delegations happen (this assumes we are successful with the application of course). Within the rules and standards that ICANN sets, we will do whatever we reasonably can to make the gTLDs as natively Cardano compatible as possible to bridge Web2 and Web3.

  1. Will you be giving the Community Advisory Group a high level of autonomy in the way that they make decisions for gTLD policy, or will policy be set by CF leadership?

Our goal is for the advisory group (the core of which already exists informally since spring) to have complete independence to make recommendations and critique our approach. And we will endeavour to find a way to satisfy as many interest as possible. Ultimately though, because the advisory group may also disagree with each other / have competing interests and because of the legal obligations required for operating a gTLD (i.e. the contract and rules applied by ICANN), the final call on what is implemented will be with CF leadership.

  1. Who will receive profits from domain registrations? Will it be the CF or could this be an inflow to the Cardano Treasury?

The revenue from the two gTLDs will accrue with the Cardano Foundation as the gTLD operator. We will be running these on a cost-plus basis. Based on our model calculations we are reasonably confident we can run it at worst without a material loss.

But there are a lot of uncertainties in the model. And if you take the optimistic scenario, then there may be an overall profit from operating the gTLDs. If we achieve this positive outcome, the intent is to then first use such profits to support development, integrations etc. as required to make the entire Web2 to Web3 infrastructure stack even better (e.g. together with AdaHandles or Handshake and hopefully others). If there is no need for this or if the profit is unexpectedly large, refilling the Cardano Treasury would also be an option.

Please reply to this post if you think I missed something important or have follow-ups. It might take me a few days to respond, so please bear with me.

Thank you all for your interest (and, if applicable, support :wink:).

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A great initiative! My view is that we shouldn’t consider who registers or recent conflict issues (in my opinion, those are just personal issues). We need to look at the common good for the entire ecosystem through this.
Yes, the simple issue to focus on here is the existence or non-existence of the .ada and .cardano domains and whether or not we miss this registration opportunity.

I also have concerns about how the Community Advisory Group will operate. However, considering the level of decentralization of the ecosystem at this time, the relevant content in the proposal seems reasonable to me.

Finally, this is not a question but a suggestion: Should CF conduct widespread community surveys to demonstrate strong community support for this? I think on-chain governance voting is very strong evidence, however, on-chain governance is still very new in our real lives.

Note: I have also translated the article into Vietnamese and edited it to suit the Vietnamese-speaking community while still maintaining almost the original meaning.

Vietnamese translation : Bảo đảm tên miền cấp cao chung cho hệ sinh thái Cardano

For Vietnam community:
Các bạn có thể tham gia thảo luận ngay tại đây hoặc các group cộng đồng Việt Nam nói chung (forum hoặc bất kỳ nơi nào)

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Cardano Foundation should establish an independent legal structure to manage such critical digital infrastructure. One that is community-governed.

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Thanks for translating the article into Vietnamese, Jimmy!

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Thank you for the idea. We did consider a separate structure for this project. However there are three major problems with that idea.

First, at this stage there would be nothing for that structure to do beyond file the application and wait for an undetermined time. Second, it is unclear whether this venture will ever even create a profit. Meaning a separate structure might be in financial distress from day one. Thirdly and most critically, ICANN has significant substance requirements for the applicant (e.g. good standing, banking setup, existing relationship with registry service provider, audited financials, etc.).

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My pleasure, Nicolas! :smiley:

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We must not let the Aussie Dental Association take our ADA domain.

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So 700kUSD to procure the domains, and approx 350kUSD annually. So what is the estimated payback period? If we assume similar charges to a dot com domain (approx $25-50/annum) that would mean you need to sell 7,000 domain registrations/annum to break even and lets call it 10,000 registrations/annum to recover the initial capital costs in a reasonable time frame.

Do you have any evidence (market research for example) that demonstrates that level of demand is plausible?

Do you have any data on what problems this will solve that the ecosystem is currently facing and the costs that the ecosystem is incurring from the problems?

That would help establish whether there is a positive ROI for this proposal. At the moment from the information presented above that isn’t clear.

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Thank you for your question(s). I understand that you are asking two distinct things here. First, how do we know we will break even (or more) with this venture and is there any data to back this up. Second, what problems does this solve for the ecosystem.

Regarding the first question, we have gotten many data points from conversation with both community experts and people who have been doing domain sales for decades. The public dataset for domains is unfortunately pretty opaque, as most domain operators do not publish much. But what we have gotten, we have used to build three scenarios. In the optimistic one, we would be break even (incl. capital investment) after about 3-5 years. In the (very) pessimistic one, we would be able to run it at a small loss indefinitely but would not make back our capital investment. Ultimately one of the challenges is that we got very different expert opinions for the financial success of this project. This is one reason we decided to entirely self-fund, as we did not feel comfortable putting this risk on anyone else.

Regarding the second question, we believe this can help improve the Cardano ecosystem in four main areas: Briding (natively) Web3 and Web3 ecosystems, bringing in new users / exposing users to Cardano tech and use cases, increasing visibility and credibility of Cardano and unlocking new blockchain x DNS use cases.

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Thanks for getting back. Makes sense.
A couple more thoughts. It occured that Ethereum tried this some time back and I wondered whether you have spoken to anyone from their foundation or ecosystem to determine how successful it has been? For example interesting to see how the pricing compares for ENS (Ethereum Name Service – ENS: Domain Names for Web3 | Gemini).
Obviously strong links with ADAhandle, and possible benefits if Cardano implements emerging X402 payments over HTTP (https://www.x402.org)?

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You are very welcome.

ENS is closer to AdaHandles than a full fat gTLD, but as far as we know ETF did implement a number of neat quality of life functions to make it so that you could tie the two worlds together. But the last gTLDs were available in 2012/2013, so there is no crypto ecosystem out there that has an actual gTLD to its name.

Yes, the link to AdaHandles is obvious and is why we want to work with them. As for x402, we are currently looking at the implementation of that for Cardano together with Masumi/NMKR (using some blocks the community has already started on!) as soon as possible.

Lots of exciting things!

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That’s great to hear. Thanks for taking time to respond.