# The Trademark Clearinghouse and sunrise, absent onchain
> In the DNS, trademark owners get a head start when a new TLD opens. How that works in outline, and why onchain registries had no such phase.
Source: https://hush.partners/trademark-clearinghouse-and-sunrise-explained
Category: Market & ICANN
Published by Hush Partners.
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When a new generic top-level domain opens inside the DNS, a brand owner who has prepared can register the name matching their mark before any member of the public gets access. That window is called sunrise, and the record behind it is called the Trademark Clearinghouse. Together they form one of the few points in the internet's naming system where trademark rights and name registration are formally joined.
Onchain TLDs opened without any equivalent structure. There was no reserved phase, no verified record of rights holders, no priority queue. The first person to submit a valid transaction became the holder. If you work in brand protection and assumed that something like sunrise must exist onchain, this article explains why that assumption does not hold and what follows from the gap.
By the end, you will know what sunrise and the Clearinghouse do inside the DNS, what they were never meant to cover, why onchain registries had nothing of the kind, and which practical options that leaves a mark owner.
## The problem sunrise was designed to solve
Each time a new generic TLD launches in the DNS, it creates a fresh namespace: a set of names that did not exist the day before. Before any name under the new TLD is registered, the registry operator has to decide how names are allocated. The simplest approach is first come, first served from day one: whoever submits the registration request first gets the name. That works well for names with no prior significance. It works badly for names that already carry meaning in the world, and in particular for names that match registered trademarks.
Without a reserved phase, the opening of a new TLD is a race. A brand owner who is slightly slow, or who simply does not know that a TLD is opening, can find that the name corresponding to their mark has gone to someone else. That person may have registered the name because it matches the mark, hoping to resell it or to draw on the mark's reputation. Or the registration may be unrelated to the brand altogether, made by someone who wanted that word for a purpose of their own.
Either way, the brand owner ends up in the same position. A third party holds a name under the new TLD that is identical to their mark, and the brand owner has to decide whether to negotiate, to open a dispute, or to live with it. Each of those choices costs time and money, and the cost repeats with every new TLD that opens.
That repetition is what made the problem structural. One new TLD is a manageable event. A program that opens many new TLDs over a short period turns a manageable event into a standing burden on every mark owner, including those with no interest in the new names at all. Sunrise was built to remove the race for the names where the race does the most damage, and the Clearinghouse was built so that a mark owner would not have to prove the same right again to every registry.
## The Trademark Clearinghouse as a record of verified marks
The Trademark Clearinghouse, often shortened to TMCH, is a central record of trademark data set up under ICANN's new gTLD program. A mark owner, or an agent acting for them, submits a mark with supporting information. The Clearinghouse checks that submission against the source of the right and, if the mark is accepted, keeps a verified record that registries and registrars can rely on.
Verification is the point. The Clearinghouse does not take a claim on trust. In outline, it accepts marks that are registered at national or regional level, and certain marks that a court has validated or that a statute or treaty protects. A pending application that has not yet matured into a registration is not enough, and neither is reputation alone. The detailed eligibility rules are the Clearinghouse's own, and the legal position behind any given mark varies by country, so your own counsel is the right source on whether a particular mark qualifies.
Once a mark is recorded, its owner receives a verification file tied to the record. That file is what a registry asks for when the owner applies for a name during sunrise. It lets the registry confirm eligibility without examining trademark certificates itself, which is what makes a single record usable across many TLD launches.
Two points about the Clearinghouse are often misunderstood.
First, a record in the Clearinghouse creates no legal right. The right is the trademark, granted and governed by the law of the country or region that issued it. The Clearinghouse stores evidence that the right exists and passes that evidence on.
Second, the Clearinghouse does not decide between rights. Trademark law allows the same word to be registered by different owners for different goods, or in different countries. All of them can hold a valid record for the same word. The Clearinghouse confirms that each mark exists. It does not rank them, and it does not promise any name to any owner.
## Sunrise: the priority window before general availability
Sunrise is a period that comes before a TLD opens to the public, during which only owners of verified marks can register names. Under ICANN's new gTLD program, a registry operator is required to run one before general registration starts. A registration request made during sunrise must come with the verification file from the Clearinghouse. Anyone without a verified record simply cannot register in that window.
The name on offer is the one that corresponds to the mark as recorded. Sunrise is not a general license to collect names related to a brand. It is first refusal on the name that reproduces the mark, in that TLD, for the length of the window.
### Two ways a registry can run it
Registries have some freedom in how they organize the period. In one variant, the registry collects every request made during the window and allocates names once the window has closed. In the other, requests are handled in the order they arrive, so a name goes to the first eligible owner who asks for it. The first variant gives every eligible owner the same chance regardless of timing. The second rewards the owner who is ready on the opening day.
### When two verified marks want the same name
Because several owners can hold a valid mark for the same word, two eligible requests for one name are possible. The registry settles that under its own published rules, and an auction limited to the eligible parties is a common method. The Clearinghouse plays no part in choosing between them.
How a mark owner secures a name in a new DNS TLD
Record the markSubmit the mark and its supporting information to the Trademark Clearinghouse. If the mark is accepted, the owner receives a verification file tied to the record. This has to be done before a sunrise opens.
Follow the launchesTrack which new TLDs are approaching their sunrise and decide, TLD by TLD, where the name is worth holding. Most brand teams rely on their registrar or an adviser for this calendar.
Apply during sunriseThrough a registrar, request the name that matches the mark and present the verification file. The general public cannot register during this window.
Receive the name or resolve a contestIf no other eligible owner asks for the same name, it is registered to the applicant. If another verified mark competes for it, the registry applies its own rules to decide.
One practical consequence follows from the sequence above. Sunrise protects the owner who acts. A mark owner who records nothing, or who records the mark and then lets a window pass, has no priority once the TLD opens to everyone.
## Claims notices: the follow-on protection
Sunrise ends, general registration begins, and a second service takes over for a limited initial period. It is usually called the claims service, and it works by notice instead of by priority.
During that period, a person who tries to register a name that matches a mark recorded in the Clearinghouse is shown a notice before the registration completes. The notice tells them that a recorded mark corresponds to the name and sets out the information the mark owner has put on record. The applicant has to acknowledge the notice before the registration can go ahead.
The notice does not block anything. An applicant who acknowledges it can register the name. If they do, the owners of the matching records are informed that the name has been registered. The service therefore runs in two directions. It warns the applicant before the fact, and it tells the mark owner after the fact.
Its value is informational and evidentiary. A registrant who went ahead after reading the notice cannot easily say later that they had never heard of the mark, and that can matter if the mark owner brings a complaint under the UDRP, the dispute policy that applies to names in generic TLDs through the registration agreement. How much weight such a notice carries in a given dispute is for the panel, and for your counsel to assess. What the claims service does not do is keep the name out of other hands.
## What these mechanisms never covered
The Clearinghouse and sunrise give real protection inside clear limits. A brand protection team needs to know exactly where the coverage stops, because the limits explain a good deal of what happened onchain.
**Exact matches only.** Both sunrise and the claims notice work on names that reproduce the recorded mark. Misspellings, abbreviations, translations and names that combine the mark with another word fall outside the match unless a particular registry has chosen to go further. A third party can register a name that contains the mark as one part of a longer string without meeting either mechanism.
**Registered or otherwise validated marks only.** A brand that relies on unregistered rights, in countries that recognize them, gets no priority from the Clearinghouse however strong its reputation is. The same holds for a mark that is still an application.
**Names under a TLD, not the TLD itself.** Sunrise allocates names under a TLD that already exists. It says nothing about who gets to run the TLD. If your mark is "yourbrand" and another party applies to ICANN for `.yourbrand`, the answer lies in the objection procedures of the application process, not in sunrise and not in the Clearinghouse. This limit matters a great deal for the comparison with onchain registries, where the TLD itself is the object that can be registered and held.
**Only TLDs bound by ICANN's program rules.** The obligation to run sunrise and a claims period comes from the contract between ICANN and the registry operator of a new generic TLD. Country-code TLDs follow their own national rules, and some of them have run priority phases of their own design while others have not. Any naming system that sits outside ICANN's contracts is outside the obligation altogether.
**Not every name in the TLD.** A registry operator can hold back names, or set them aside for its own purposes, under the terms of its agreement. A mark owner can therefore find that the matching name is not on offer during sunrise at all, or is on offer on terms that differ from an ordinary name.
**No automatic protection.** Recording a mark does not register any name. The owner still has to apply, TLD by TLD, and carry the registration and renewal of every name they take. For a brand with a large portfolio of marks, taking the matching name in every new TLD is a budget decision, and many teams choose a short list of TLDs and accept the rest as a monitored risk.
Sunrise is an opportunity, not an entitlement. It moves the mark owner to the front of the line for one exact name, for a limited time, in one family of TLDs.
## Onchain registration: open from the first transaction
An onchain TLD is a TLD recorded on a public blockchain instead of in the DNS root that ICANN coordinates. The registries that issue these TLDs work outside ICANN's program. They signed no registry agreement, so none of the obligations described above reached them.
The consequence is structural. When an onchain registry opened for registration, there was no phase reserved for rights holders, no verified record of marks to check against, and no verification file to present. Registration is carried out by a smart contract, which is a program on the blockchain that executes whenever it receives a valid request. The contract checks whether the string is free and whether the payment is correct. It has no view of trademark registers, and it does not ask who is applying.
### Why no priority phase was built
It would be wrong to read this as carelessness. A priority phase needs three things that the DNS assembled over a long period and that an onchain registry does not have by default.
It needs a trusted verifier, an organization that can examine trademark records from many countries and vouch for them. It needs a rule that forces every registry to consult that verifier, which in the DNS is the contract with ICANN. And it needs registrants to be identifiable enough for notices to reach them, which the registrar relationship provides.
An onchain registry has no contract with a coordinating body, and its registrants are wallets, meaning sets of keys that hold tokens, not customers with a verified name and address. A registry could have designed a reserved phase of its own. Without a shared record of verified marks and a common obligation, any such phase would have been local to that registry and partial. In practice, the registries opened to everyone at once.
### What the record does show
Freename is a clear illustration of the model. A TLD registered there exists as a token on the blockchain, and that token sits in a wallet. Whoever holds the TLD is the only party able to issue names beneath it. The holder pays no yearly renewal fee to keep the TLD. A brand protection team needs no permission to read that record: it is public, and a block explorer, a website that displays the contents of a blockchain, lets anyone check it.
Those properties make the present state of a name easy to establish. They also mean that a registration, once made, does not lapse for want of a renewal. In the DNS, a name that its registrant stops paying for eventually returns to the pool, and a patient mark owner sometimes recovers a name simply by waiting. Where there is no renewal, that route does not exist.
## The consequence: names that match marks are held by early registrants
Open registration from the first transaction, combined with the fact that few organizations were watching, leads to a predictable pattern. The people who registered first were those who were following onchain naming when it was little known. They registered sector words, dictionary terms and, in some cases, strings that are also somebody's trademark.
It would be a mistake to assume a single motive. Many words are a brand in one industry and an ordinary term everywhere else, and a registrant who takes such a word may never have thought of the brand. Some registrations were made with a specific mark in mind. The public record does not tell you which is which. It shows that a string is registered and which wallet holds it. It does not show a name, an intention or a plan.
Three differences from the DNS shape what a mark owner finds.
The first is the level at which the match occurs. In the DNS, sunrise deals with names under a TLD, and the TLD itself is allocated through a long application process. Onchain, the TLD is what gets registered. A mark owner may therefore find that the matching string exists as a whole TLD, `.yourbrand`, with the holder free to issue names such as `pay.yourbrand` under it.
The second is the absence of any record of notice. In the DNS, a registrant who passed through a claims notice has acknowledged the mark in writing. Onchain, no notice was shown to anyone. A holder may well have been unaware of the mark, and nothing in the record suggests otherwise.
The third is the absence of a shared dispute policy. The UDRP reaches DNS registrants because every registration agreement in a generic TLD incorporates it. No comparable policy runs across onchain registries. A mark owner who wants to contest a registration has to look to the general law of the relevant countries and to the terms of the registry concerned. Outcomes there depend on the facts, on how the name is used and on the jurisdiction.
None of this is a defect in a particular registry. It is what a system designed for open, permissionless registration produces when it meets words that already belong to someone as marks. The DNS made a different choice and paid for it with process, cost and time. Each design has its merits. For the brand owner, the practical fact is that priority was never on offer, so the question is no longer how to be first. It is what to do about a name that already has a holder.
## Comparing the DNS and onchain paths for a mark owner
The table sets the two paths side by side. It is not a ranking. On rights protection, the DNS path is plainly the more developed of the two, and the [comparison of a dotBrand and an onchain TLD](/dotbrand-vs-onchain-tld) covers the wider differences in cost, control and reach.
| Stage | New generic TLD in the DNS | Onchain TLD |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reserved phase | Sunrise, with a verified record | None, open from the first transaction |
| Priority for mark owners | Yes, for the exact match | No |
| Notice to the applicant | Claims notice in the initial period | None |
| Notice to the mark owner | Sent when a matching name is taken | None, unless the owner monitors |
| Shared dispute policy | UDRP | None, general law applies |
| Public record | Registration data, often redacted | Registry record on a block explorer |
Read across the last two rows and the trade becomes clear. The DNS gives a mark owner a procedure but often withholds the registrant's details. The onchain record is fully public but anonymous in a different way: you can see the wallet and its history, and nothing tells you who is behind it.
## What a mark owner can do now
The absence of sunrise does not leave a mark owner without options. It changes their nature. The DNS offers a procedure that runs before registration. Onchain, the work happens after the fact, and it starts with knowing what exists.
### Establish what is registered
Begin with the facts. Check whether the string matching each of your main marks exists as an onchain TLD, and whether names matching your marks have been issued under other TLDs. The [trademark TLDs](/trademark-tlds) page explains what a TLD matching a mark is and holds the free Trademark Name Check. The [Namespace Exposure Score](/namespace-exposure-score) gives a structured reading of how exposed a brand is onchain. Both are starting points for a conversation with counsel, not legal opinions.
### Decide what each finding deserves
Not every match calls for action. A sensible triage separates three situations: a TLD that reproduces a core mark, a name under someone else's TLD that reproduces a mark, and a string that merely resembles one. For each, the questions are the familiar ones from DNS practice. Is the name in use, and for what? Could a customer be misled? Would holding the name be useful to the business, or is the concern purely defensive? A name that sits unused in a wallet carries a different risk from one that is put in front of your customers.
For a name issued under a TLD you do not hold, remember who controls issuance. Since names beneath a TLD can come only from its holder, the holder of the TLD is the party that matters, and the terms of the registry are the place to look for any complaint route.
### Keep watching
In the DNS, the claims service tells a mark owner when a matching name is taken, for a limited period. Onchain, nobody sends that message. An organization that wants to know has to look, either with its own team or through a service such as [Namespace Watch](/namespace-watch), which monitors the names of a brand onchain. The [glossary](/glossary) defines the terms a team will meet along the way.
### Acquire by agreement where it makes sense
An onchain TLD is a transferable asset. Where an organization decides that it wants to hold the TLD matching its mark, the direct route is a negotiated purchase from the holder. Whether that is preferable to a legal route, or to doing nothing, is a judgment for the organization and its counsel, and it turns on price, on the strength of the mark and on the jurisdictions involved.
This is the part of the problem Hush Partners works on. An organization can mandate the desk to find and approach the holder of a TLD, which is what [buy-side acquisition](/buy-side-acquisition) covers, and [brand namespace recovery](/brand-namespace-recovery) describes the same work for the TLD that matches a brand. A standard mutual NDA applies to every exchange, and closing runs through onchain escrow on an aftermarket. The page for [brands and legal teams](/brands-and-legal-teams) sets out where a legal department would start.
A reasonable first step is modest: run the checks, write down what exists for your three or four most important marks, and take that list to your counsel before deciding anything else.
## Questions people ask
### Does a Clearinghouse record help with an onchain name?
Not as a matter of procedure. Onchain registries are not party to ICANN's registry agreements, so a record gives its owner no priority and triggers no notice there. The underlying trademark is another matter. It remains a right under the law that granted it, and your counsel may rely on it in a negotiation or a claim. The record stays useful for what it was built for, which is the opening of new TLDs in the DNS.
### Is a brand that missed sunrise in a DNS TLD in the same position as onchain?
No. In the DNS, a mark owner who missed the window still has the claims notice during the initial period, the UDRP afterwards, and the possibility that an unrenewed name becomes available again. Onchain, none of those three exists in the same form. The comparison is useful mainly to show how much of the DNS safety net lies outside sunrise itself.
### Could an onchain registry add a priority phase later?
A registry is free to design its own rules for TLDs or names it has not yet issued, and some naming systems reserve or screen certain strings. That would be a policy of the registry concerned, not a shared obligation, and it would not alter registrations already made. Check the current terms of the registry in question instead of assuming either way.
### Does holding the matching TLD onchain replace DNS registrations?
No. Onchain names resolve outside the DNS, and an ordinary browser does not open them without added support. Coverage in wallets and browsers is partial and changes over time. An organization that acquires its matching TLD adds a new asset to its portfolio. Its domain names, its Clearinghouse record and its sunrise routine in the DNS remain as necessary as before.