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New gTLD to increase prices 10x, add blockchain voting service

Kevin Murphy, January 4, 2018, Domain Registries

The new gTLD .voting is to suffer a steep price increase as its registry bakes a new “e-voting solution” into its offering.
Valuetainment, the Germany-based registry, informed registrars of its decision recently.
While I don’t know the exact figures involved, it appears the annual wholesale cost of a .voting domain will rise more than tenfold.
Currently, the retail price of a .voting domain can range from $60 to $100 per year. After June 1, that price is likely to start around the $600 mark.
But the registry also told registrars it plans to bundle in with each domain an “e-voting solution” in which “votes are anchored in the blockchain”. There would be no additional charge for this service.
This actually smells a bit like innovation, something the new gTLD program has lacked to date but which sometimes scares away registrars that see mainly implementation and support costs.
Steep price increases also have a track record of scaring away registrars, as Uniregistry discovered last year.
I understand the plan is to apply the price increase to renewals for all existing .voting domains, which currently number a little under 1,000.
At the last count, two thirds of .voting domains had been sold via German reseller platform RegistryGate, with GoDaddy a distant second.
Registry representatives have not responded to a request for information about the blockchain-based voting service, so I can’t tell you much more about it other than blockchain-based systems are in vogue right now due to the popularity of speculation in electronic “currencies” such as Bitcoin.