The case against onchain TLDs, taken seriously
Limited resolution, no central authority, registry dependence, thin markets: the objections to onchain TLDs are real. Each one, and how far it goes.
A desk that deals in onchain top-level domains should be able to state the case against them without flinching. This article does that. It takes the seven strongest objections, states each one at its full weight, and then assesses what is true, what is overstated, and what would change the picture. No objection is dismissed. Several of them are decisive for certain organizations.
After reading, you will be able to judge whether an onchain TLD belongs in your organization’s asset picture, what the residual risks are if it does, and, just as importantly, when the honest answer is that it does not.
The order runs from the technical objections to the commercial ones: resolution, the absence of a central authority, dependence on a registry and on software, the track record of alternative naming, thin markets, registrations by unrelated parties and limited use by customers. A last part draws the consequences for different kinds of organizations.
The objections, at a glance
Each row of the table is developed in a section of its own below. Read the last column as a condition, not as a forecast: nothing in it is promised by anyone.
| Objection | What is true | What is overstated | What would change the picture |
|---|---|---|---|
| No resolution in ordinary browsers | Correct without added support | “They resolve nowhere” | Support built into mainstream browsers |
| No authority, no dispute process | The UDRP does not apply | “Trademark law stops here” | A shared dispute procedure across registries |
| Dependence on registry and software | Resolution relies on both | “The asset vanishes with the registry” | Independent resolvers for the same names |
| Alternative naming stayed marginal | The base rate is poor | “It always fails” | Default support in common software |
| Thin markets, opaque prices | Both are accurate | “No value can be established” | Public, comparable sales records |
| Holders with no link to the brand | It happens in every open system | “Every holder acts in bad faith” | Clear, accepted routes to resolve claims |
| Limited use by real customers | Use is narrow and hard to measure | “Nobody uses them” | Independent measures of actual use |
They do not resolve in ordinary browsers
This is the objection most often stated, and it is accurate. An onchain TLD sits outside the ICANN DNS root, the single authoritative list of top-level domains that ordinary browsers rely on when a user types a name. Without additional support, the browser has nowhere to look the name up. The page does not open, and the user is rarely told why.
The support that exists is partial and worth stating precisely. Freename names are recognized by Bitcoin.com Wallet. MetaMask handles them by way of a resolver that Freename supplies. On a desktop browser, they open once the Freename Web3 extension is installed. That list reaches people who already use crypto wallets. It does not reach the general web, and it changes over time in both directions. The page on what is live keeps the list of working capabilities with its sources.
Resolution is therefore a matter of degree. A conventional domain name resolves everywhere. An onchain TLD resolves in specific wallets, in browsers with a specific extension, and in applications that have added support for the registry. For a payment workflow addressed to people who already use those wallets, that may be sufficient. For a website meant for the general public, it is not, and here the DNS is simply better.
The usual reply is that browser support will broaden. It may. Nothing in the public record commits any mainstream browser to it, and a business case that depends on it is a bet on a decision made by others. Plan for the resolution environment that exists, not the one that might arrive.
A second-order point is often missed. Partial resolution does not only limit reach, it also shapes what failure looks like. A customer who types pay.yourbrand into software without support does not see an error message from you. They see nothing useful, and they may conclude the name is wrong or the service is down. Any operational use therefore needs a conventional address beside it, and clear wording about where the onchain name works.
There is no authority and no dispute process
The UDRP (the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) is the main mechanism by which trademark owners recover domain names registered in bad faith under ICANN-administered TLDs. It works because it is written into the contracts that tie registrars and registrants together. Onchain registries stand outside that contractual chain. No equivalent mandatory process applies to an onchain TLD or to the names under it, and no central body exists to hear a claim.
This is a real gap. A trademark owner who finds that .yourbrand is held by an unrelated party has no UDRP complaint to file. What remains is a negotiated acquisition, court proceedings whose reach depends on the country and on whether the holder can be identified and served, and whatever the registry’s own terms provide. None of these is as quick or as predictable as a UDRP proceeding, and the cost of each is harder to estimate in advance.
The point should not be overstated. The UDRP does not create trademark rights. They exist independently of it. A trademark generally lets its owner object to confusing use of the mark in commerce, in the territories where the mark is protected, whatever naming system is involved. Holding an onchain TLD does not shield anyone from such a claim. The difficulty lies in enforcement, not in the right itself, and the rules vary by country. Your own counsel decides what is available in a given case.
One feature of the onchain record helps both sides of a dispute. Neither a trademark owner nor a holder needs permission to read the registry record: it is public, and a block explorer, a website that displays the contents of a blockchain, lets anyone check it. The date on which a TLD was created is therefore a matter of record that neither party controls. For a trademark owner, that settles one factual question, which came first, without a request to any authority.
What the objection gets right, in the end, is the absence of a referee. In the DNS, a party that refuses to engage can be compelled into a procedure. Onchain, a holder who does not answer cannot be made to, short of a court. An organization that needs certainty of outcome within a fixed period will not find it here. The glossary defines the UDRP, ICANN and the onchain terms used in this article.
The holder depends on a registry and on a software layer
On Freename, a TLD is a token: an entry on a blockchain that a wallet controls. The record of who holds it is public. Resolution is another matter. Turning a name into a wallet address, a website or a payment destination depends on resolver software and on the registry continuing to run it.
If a registry stopped operating, changed how its names resolve, or were taken over and rebuilt, names that resolve now might stop resolving. The ICANN system gives more comfort on this point: its registries operate under contracts that include continuity obligations, and the DNS itself is run by many independent operators. An onchain TLD has no equivalent floor. Its continuity rests on the commercial health and the terms of one registry.
The risk has limits, and they should be stated without inflating them. The token sits in the holder’s wallet, so a registry that went quiet would not erase the record of who holds the TLD. It would interrupt resolution. Another party could, in principle, build a resolver that reads the same record. Whether anyone would do so is a commercial question, and no holder should count on it.
The dependence the objection usually leaves out
There is a second dependence, on the holder’s own software and discipline. A token is controlled by the keys of the wallet that holds it. Lose the keys and no registrar’s help desk can restore access. Let one employee hold them alone and the asset leaves with that person. A multisignature wallet, which requires several approvals before anything moves, reduces that exposure, but it has to be set up, documented and maintained. For many legal and IT departments, this is unfamiliar ground.
There is no annual renewal fee on a Freename TLD, which removes one familiar way of losing a name: the missed renewal. It also removes the yearly prompt that keeps a domain portfolio under review. An asset that costs nothing to hold is easily forgotten, along with the keys that control it.
The practical consequence is that an organization acquiring an onchain TLD for operational use, and not only to hold it, should treat registry stability and its own custody arrangements as due diligence items. Both deserve the attention it would give to the registrar and the account security behind a conventional domain.
Earlier attempts at alternative naming stayed marginal
The history of naming systems outside the ICANN DNS is not encouraging. More than one project set out to build a parallel system of names. None of them made its names open in ordinary browsers by default. Some kept small, committed communities. The pattern is consistent: without a broad base of software that resolves the names, an alternative system serves insiders and leaves general users behind.
The reason is structural, not a matter of effort or quality. A naming system is only as useful as the number of places where its names work, and those places are decided by the makers of browsers, operating systems and network equipment. They have little reason to add a second source of truth for names, and good reasons to hesitate: two systems can disagree about the same string. The DNS won by being the default everywhere. Any alternative starts from the opposite position.
The fair version of this objection is not that alternative naming always fails, since some systems persist and find a niche. It is that the base rate for reaching mainstream resolution is low, and that the cost of assuming otherwise falls on those who built on a system that stayed small.
Two things differ from the earlier attempts, and neither is a guarantee. First, wallets give onchain names a place to work that does not depend on browsers at all: a name that resolves to a payment address inside a wallet is useful to the people who use that wallet. Second, the collision between the two systems is now treated as a problem to be solved, not ignored. A U.S. patent granted to Freename AG describes a way to decide which name resolves when two collide, and names new ICANN TLDs meeting established web3 namespaces among the problems it addresses. A patent describes a method. It shows the question has been worked on, not that it is settled.
Meanwhile, the conventional system keeps growing. ICANN opened a new application round for generic TLDs in 2026, its first in more than a decade, and trade press reported 1,616 applications going forward. ICANN’s new gTLD program pages give an expected evaluation fee of USD 227,000 per application, before advisers and registry operations. Organizations commit that kind of money to the system that resolves everywhere. A skeptic is right to read that as a signal of where mainstream naming activity sits. The comparison of a dotBrand and an onchain TLD sets the two instruments side by side.
Markets are thin and prices opaque
There is no public price record for onchain TLDs comparable to the reported sales that domain investors and appraisers consult for conventional names. Most transactions are private and agreed between two parties. A holder who wants to sell, or an organization that wants to acquire, has little to anchor a figure on.
Thin markets have two consequences. Prices can land far from what a neutral observer would call fair, in either direction: a motivated buyer overpays, a motivated seller accepts too little. And liquidity is low. For a TLD that matches one brand, the realistic buyer is often a single organization. If that organization is not interested, there may be no second bid at any price.
This is a structural limitation, not a phase that is bound to pass. Markets for unusual assets tend to stay thin unless a standard form of the asset and a broad group of informed participants develop together. A TLD is by nature one of a kind, which works against the first condition.
The objection goes too far only when it concludes that no value can be reasoned about. A valuation of a TLD can be built from what the asset can do and for whom, instead of from comparable sales that are not available. That is a weaker basis than a deep market, and it should be read as one: a reasoned range with stated assumptions, not a price the market will honor.
The table sets the two secondary markets against each other on the points that matter to a buyer or a seller.
| Point | Conventional domain names | Onchain TLDs |
|---|---|---|
| Price discovery | Some sales are publicly reported | Sales are mostly private |
| Buyer pool | Often several for a generic name | Often one for a brand string |
| Disputes | UDRP or the courts | Registry terms, courts or negotiation |
| Continuity | Contractual obligations to ICANN | The registry’s own terms and health |
For a fund or a treasury, the conclusion is direct. An asset that cannot be marked to a market and may take a long time to sell belongs, if anywhere, in the part of a portfolio that tolerates both. Anyone who needs to exit on a schedule should not hold it.
Many names were registered by people with no link to the brand
Anyone can register an onchain TLD without showing a right to the string. The TLD that matches a brand may therefore already be held by a party with no connection to it. The pattern is not peculiar to blockchains. Every naming system that opens registration without prior checks has seen names taken by people other than the obvious claimant, and onchain systems are not exempt.
The objection usually stops there, and it should not, because the holders are not all alike. Some registered a string in the expectation that a brand would want it one day. Some registered a word for a project of their own that happens to coincide with a mark, possibly a mark in another country or another line of business. Some do not know the string is protected anywhere. A word can be a trademark for one company and an ordinary term for everyone else. Treating every holder as an opponent is both inaccurate and a poor way to open a conversation.
For the organization, the skeptical reading is this: an open system created a problem you did not ask for, and it offers no inexpensive procedure to fix it. That reading is correct. What follows from it is less obvious. The useful first question is whether the name is in use in a way that could confuse your customers or harm your reputation. A TLD that is held and unused causes little harm in an environment where it resolves for few people. A TLD in active use under your mark is a different matter, and one for your counsel.
The second question is what you are prepared to do about it. The realistic choices are to keep watch, to seek an acquisition by negotiation, or, in serious cases, to go to court. Deciding to do nothing after looking is a legitimate position. Not looking is not a position at all. Monitoring the names of a brand onchain is what Namespace Watch is for, and the page for brands and legal teams sets out the wider picture.
Use by real customers is still limited
Registration is not use. A name can be registered in a moment and never carry a payment, a website or a message. No public, independent measure separates the onchain names that are in use from those that are merely held, and in the absence of such a measure, claims of adoption deserve caution. A skeptic who asks for evidence of customers, and not of registrations, is asking the right question.
This matters for two reasons. A TLD whose names are not used offers little proof that anyone wants what it provides. And the use most often cited, payment addressing, in which a sender types pay.yourbrand in place of a long hexadecimal address, works in specific wallets and is not part of the payment habits of most people. The page on payments to a name describes what functions.
The fair position is that use is narrow, which is different from absent. Payments from one wallet to another can be addressed to an onchain name. Websites can be published under an onchain TLD and reached by people whose browser supports it. What nobody can show is how much of this reflects durable habits and how much reflects a community trying out infrastructure that most people will never meet.
The answer depends on which users matter to you. If your customers already hold crypto wallets and pay from them, a name that resolves in those wallets does a job for them, whatever the general public does. If your customers live on the conventional web, the same name is invisible to them, and the money and attention are better spent elsewhere.
There is also a cost that the enthusiasts’ case tends to leave out. Putting a TLD to work means issuing names, publishing something under them, explaining to customers where they resolve and supporting them when they do not. For an organization without customers in that environment, this is effort spent on an audience it does not have.
For whom these assets make sense, and for whom they do not
The objections do not carry equal weight for every reader. Resolution and limited use bear on anyone who wants to reach customers. Registry dependence and custody bear on anyone who wants to operate. Thin markets bear on anyone who expects to sell. The absence of a dispute process bears on trademark owners. Start from the ones that touch your purpose.
An onchain TLD can make sense for an organization that meets most of these conditions: a meaningful share of its customers use crypto wallets; it can hold the asset for a long time without needing it to perform; its conventional domain portfolio is already in order; and it can manage a token under proper controls. It can also make sense, more modestly, for an organization that simply prefers the TLD matching its mark to be in its own hands, and accepts that this is a cautious holding and not a channel.
It is unlikely to make sense for an organization with no customers in that environment, no internal capacity to keep a token safe, or no appetite for dependence on a single registry. It makes no sense as a substitute for a domain name. For a TLD that resolves everywhere, under a defined contractual framework, the ICANN program is the right instrument, at a cost and with obligations of a different order.
For a holder, the same candor applies. A TLD with no annual renewal fee is inexpensive to keep, which is not the same as valuable. If the only plausible buyer is one organization and that organization has concluded that doing nothing is right, the asset may not find a buyer.
A concrete next step costs little. Write down the strings that match your marks, and establish whether the corresponding TLDs exist onchain and whether anything is published under them. The page on trademark TLDs explains the subject and holds the free Trademark Name Check form. Then put the seven objections to your own case, with your counsel, and decide.
If the decision is to act, Hush Partners is a private desk for onchain TLDs. It acts under mandate, either for a holder who wants a buyer or for an organization that wants a holder found and approached. A standard mutual NDA covers each exchange, a single named partner stays with the file from the first note to closing, and closing goes through onchain escrow on an aftermarket. A holder can ask for a private valuation. The desk can make a narrow, illiquid market workable. It cannot answer for you the question of whether to be in it.
Questions people ask
Does holding an onchain TLD protect against third-party registrations of names under it?
Within the registry, yes. Whoever holds a Freename TLD is the only party able to issue names under it, so an organization that holds .yourbrand decides who receives pay.yourbrand and every other name under it. That protection stops at the edge of the registry: it says nothing about the same string in another naming system.
Is there an equivalent of sunrise periods for onchain TLDs?
No common rule applies across onchain registries. In the ICANN system, a sunrise period lets trademark owners register names in a new TLD before the general public. Onchain, each registry sets its own terms, and a trademark owner should not expect to be notified when a matching string is registered. Anyone who wants to know has to look.
What happens to an onchain TLD if the registry that issued it stops operating?
The token would remain in the holder’s wallet, so the record of who holds it would survive. Resolution is what would be at risk: the ability of wallets, browsers and applications to look up a name and return an address. Whether another resolver would take over the namespace cannot be known in advance. This is the main risk for a holder who intends to operate the TLD and not only to keep it.
Can an onchain TLD collide with a string applied for in the ICANN 2026 round?
It can. The same string may exist in both systems, and software that supports both has to choose. U.S. patent US 12,401,618 B1, held by Freename AG, filed on February 23, 2024 and granted on August 26, 2025, addresses that situation. According to the patent text on Google Patents and to Domain Name Wire’s report on the grant, competing names are scored under a set of rules and the score determines which one resolves. “First registration”, meaning the earliest date of creation, is one of the weighted criteria. The grant of a patent is not a decision of any court, and ICANN is under no obligation to follow the method. How a given resolver handles a collision will depend on who built it.
