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Over 100 new gTLD bids have already been announced
With the 2026 ICANN new gTLD application window now officially open, one striking difference compared to the 2012 round is the number of organizations that have broken cover to announce that they will apply.
Back in 2012, consultants excitedly pointed to Canon, the Japanese electronics firm, as the convincer. It had openly revealed it planned to apply for the dot-brand .canon two years earlier.
A handful of gTLDs related to communities, cities or causes — such as .gay, .nyc and .eco — had also been announced. Several had multiple announced applicants and were ultimately contested.
But today, with the application window now five days open, DI’s free risk analysis tool, Stringtel, currently has more than 100 announced applications in its database.
With dot-brands expected to make up a sizeable chunk of 2026 applications, very few major brands have actually put their heads above the parapet. Salesforce seems to be the most well-known, though its revelation came via an ICANN director’s conflict disclosure rather than a full-throated formal announcement.
The biggest cohort of announced applications seems to come from applicants representing an if not entirely then certainly uncommon type of gTLD — which you could call the non-dot-brand-dot-brand, or perhaps more simply “open dot-brand”.
By this I mean organizations, typically in the blockchain or cryptocurrency space, that have said they will apply for gTLDs matching their brand but make second-level domains available to their users, rather then keeping the whole namespace in-house.
There are dozens of such announced bids. Some are already selling domains that resolve on blockchains rather than DNS. Due to cost, complexity, or risk, I don’t expect every announcement in this space to translate into an eventual application.
We’ve also seen announcements of applications for generic strings, often in hot industries such as AI, crypto or podcasting. Stringtel already has records for the likes of .crypto, .agi, .podcast and .blockchain, for example. A couple, such as .chain and .anime, are already contested.
While we’ll likely discover how many applications ICANN has received not long after the application window closes in August, we won’t find out what strings have been applied for until October at the earliest.
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