Trademark TLDs onchain: what they are and why they exist

In the onchain naming systems that have grown up outside the ICANN root, the string in the top-level position (the part after the final dot) is registered through an open process. A string that is free goes to the first person or organization that registers it, without the multi-stage application that a top-level domain goes through in the DNS. That openness made the namespace productive for generic terms and invented names. It also meant that strings matching the names of established organizations were available on a first-come, first-served basis, and some of those strings were registered.

That is the phenomenon this article describes. If your organization’s name, or a close variant of it, exists as a TLD on a public blockchain, the situation is not novel. A version of it played out in the early years of the commercial internet, when domain names matching well-known brands were registered before the brand owners saw a reason to act. The anatomy is similar. The technology and some of the legal geography are different.

By the end of this article you will understand what a trademark TLD is, how it came to exist, why the holdings are concentrated in relatively few hands, what a holder can and cannot do with such a name, and what the situation means for an organization whose name is held in a wallet it does not control. Questions of action (how to assess exposure, how an approach is made, how a name is acquired) are left to the pages this article links to. The purpose here is understanding.

What a trademark TLD is

A trademark TLD is an onchain top-level domain whose string is identical or closely similar to a name, mark or abbreviation that an organization has registered as a trademark or established as a well-known brand, and that is held by someone other than that organization.

The definition has two parts that matter. First, the TLD sits at the top level: it is .yourbrand, not a name under some other extension. That position is significant because the top level controls the entire namespace beneath it. Whoever holds .yourbrand decides, within the registry’s rules, who can register pay.yourbrand, careers.yourbrand or any other name under that extension. Second, the string corresponds to a mark that belongs to someone else. A generic word registered as a TLD is a market TLD. A brand name registered as a TLD by someone other than the brand owner is a trademark TLD. The distinction is about the relationship between the string and the trademark record, not about the intent of the person who registered it.

The following table sets out the practical differences between the two categories.

The boundary is not always sharp. Many marks are also ordinary words, and a word that is a famous brand in one industry is a plain descriptive term in another. Trademark law itself works by classes of goods and services and by territory, so the same string can be a trademark TLD from one organization’s point of view and a market TLD from everyone else’s. Where a string falls is a judgment for the organization and its counsel, not a property written into the registry.

A trademark TLD is also not an ICANN dotBrand. A dotBrand, the kind of extension a large company applies for in an ICANN application round, is a TLD delegated by ICANN and placed in the DNS root, which means every browser resolves it by default and ICANN’s rules, including its rights protection mechanisms, apply throughout. An onchain TLD is recorded on a public blockchain as a token and resolves only in software that supports the relevant namespace. The comparison between a dotBrand and an onchain TLD is set out side by side elsewhere. The point here is that they are not the same instrument and do not carry the same legal and technical properties.

How open registration made brand strings available

The registries that issue onchain TLDs work on a model of open registration. Freename is the registry this article refers to. In outline, a person connects a wallet (the software that holds the keys to blockchain assets), pays for the chosen string and receives a token representing that TLD. On Freename, that token, sitting in a wallet, is the form in which the TLD is recorded onchain. Nothing in that sequence resembles the evaluation a DNS application passes through, and nothing in it requires the registrant to be the organization the string brings to mind.

Two features of the model shaped what happened next. The first is that a Freename TLD carries no annual renewal fee. In the DNS, a name that is registered and never used costs its registrant a fee every year, which over time returns many unused names to the pool. An onchain TLD of this kind is paid for once. The second is the registry’s royalty program: when names are registered under a TLD, its holder is paid a share of each registration fee, which Freename advertises at up to half, subject to the registry’s current terms and activation conditions. Together these features make a TLD something that can be held for a long time at no running cost and that might earn something if a namespace develops under it. The earning side is not free, however: taking part in the royalty program carries an annual cost set by the registry. Some TLDs were registered under earlier terms that include the program for life, and whether such terms follow the TLD to a new holder is something to confirm with the registry before a sale closes.

Set that against the DNS. In ICANN’s 2026 application round, the expected evaluation fee is USD 227,000 per application, before advisers and registry operations, according to ICANN’s new gTLD program pages. An application is evaluated, and the process includes formal objection procedures through which trademark owners and others can contest a string. The cost and the procedure together mean that a top-level domain in the DNS is rarely applied for casually, and that a rights owner has a defined moment to speak.

Open onchain registration has neither the cost barrier nor that defined moment. The trademark owner is simply not a participant in the registration. That is the structural fact that allows trademark TLDs to exist at all. It is a design choice with consequences in both directions: it is the reason a small business can obtain a TLD for its own name without a six-figure application, and it is the reason a string can be registered by someone with no connection to the organization it matches.

Why registrations are concentrated

When a namespace opens without an application process, the distribution of registrations follows a pattern familiar from other open markets. Those who are present early, and who understand what is being offered, register a large share of the strings that later turn out to matter.

In the onchain TLD context, being present early required familiarity with wallets, tokens and onchain registration at a time when most brand owners had no reason to think an onchain namespace concerned them. The people who had that familiarity were few. Some of them registered many strings, and well-known names are among the first strings that come to anyone’s mind. Brand owners, for their part, were looking at the DNS, where their portfolios, their watch services and their dispute procedures already were.

The absence of a renewal fee then froze the picture. In a system with annual fees, a large holding is expensive to keep, and holders trim it every year. Without that cost, a registration made early does not lapse, and nothing pushes a holder to release what is not being used. Because the token is held in a wallet, the holder also controls it directly, without reference to an account at an intermediary.

The result is that a relatively small population of holders accounts for a large share of the TLDs that match well-known names. The concentration has a structural cause: it follows from the timing and the economics of open registration, not from any coordination. The page written for TLD holders addresses this group directly.

There is also a simpler dynamic at work. Once the holder of a trademark TLD recognizes its character, the TLD may be kept with an eventual sale in mind instead of being put to operational use. That is not different in kind from how unused domain names have been held in the DNS for decades.

What holding a trademark TLD allows

Holding an onchain TLD is a position of real, if bounded, capability. This section gives a plain account of what that position enables and where the limits lie.

Namespace control. Issuing names under a TLD is reserved to its holder. No one else can create pay.yourbrand or careers.yourbrand, whatever trademark rights the brand owner has. The holder’s control is technical: it derives from custody of the TLD token, not from any contract with the organization the string matches. If the token moves to another wallet, control moves with it.

Uses that work in supporting software. Onchain names resolve outside the DNS, so an ordinary browser does not open them unaided. Coverage is partial and it changes. Bitcoin.com Wallet reads Freename names, MetaMask does so by way of Freename’s resolver, and on a desktop the Freename Web3 extension adds them to the browser. Within those environments, a holder, or anyone to whom the holder issues a name, can use the name in place of a long hexadecimal wallet address, among other uses. The page on what is live lists each capability with its source. Outside supporting software, the name does nothing, and that gap is real.

Royalty participation. If names are registered under the TLD, the holder takes part in the royalty program under the conditions the registry publishes. For a trademark TLD this capability is mostly theoretical, for reasons the section on inactivity explains.

Transfer and sale. The TLD token can be transferred like any other onchain asset, which means the TLD can be sold. A holder who decides to part with it does not need the registry to reassign anything by hand.

What holding the TLD does not confer is any right to use the corresponding trademark, any right to claim affiliation with the brand owner, or any shelter from the remedies trademark law may give the brand owner in a given country. The position is one of control over an asset, not of legal entitlement to a name. Whether a specific holding creates legal exposure in a specific jurisdiction is a question for counsel, and the answer varies by country.

It is also worth being plain about what the holder cannot reach. The TLD has no effect on the organization’s domain names, its websites, its email or its trademark registrations. The DNS is where customers find the organization, and nothing recorded onchain changes how the DNS resolves.

How this resembles the early DNS years, and how it differs

The DNS parallel is the most useful frame for understanding trademark TLDs, so it deserves to be examined precisely instead of being used as a loose analogy.

In the early years of the commercial internet, second-level names under the generic extensions were registered on a first-come, first-served basis with no trademark screening. Individuals registered strings matching well-known company names before those companies understood that a web address would become commercially essential. The disputes that followed produced the policy that now governs the DNS: the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), an administrative procedure that a trademark owner can bring against the registrant of a domain name without going to court, and, in a number of countries, legislation on bad-faith registration.

The table below maps the similarities and the differences.

Three of these differences deserve a closer look.

The dispute mechanism

In the DNS, a trademark owner who can show that a domain name is identical or confusingly similar to its mark, that the registrant has no rights or legitimate interests in it, and that it was registered and is being used in bad faith can obtain a transfer through a comparatively quick administrative procedure. The UDRP binds registrants because every ICANN-accredited registrar writes it into its registration agreement. Onchain registries sit outside that contractual chain, so the UDRP does not reach an onchain TLD.

What remains is the general law: trademark and unfair competition rules as the courts of each country apply them, and whatever terms the registry itself publishes. How courts treat onchain names is not settled and differs from one country to the next. An organization looking at its position should do so with counsel who follows this area, not with a DNS-era checklist applied unchanged. The other route is not a dispute at all: the TLD can be bought from its holder.

The level of the name

In the DNS, a brand owner who did not register its name under a given extension was missing one second-level name among many. Onchain, a TLD covers every name beneath it, and all of them are in one holder’s hands. That is a wider form of control. It has to be weighed against the next difference, which pulls the other way.

Reach

A domain name registered by a third party in the DNS resolves for every internet user, in every browser, from the first day. An onchain TLD resolves only where software supports it. The control is broader, and the audience is far narrower. On reach, the DNS is simply the stronger system, and an honest reading of the onchain situation starts from that fact.

Why most trademark TLDs are inactive

Most trademark TLDs sit in wallets with no names issued under them, no website published through them and no public-facing activity. Understanding why helps a brand owner read the situation correctly.

The first reason is economic. Issuing names under a TLD only makes sense if someone wants those names. For a string that is someone else’s brand, there is no natural community of users who want a name under .yourbrand unless the brand owner itself is behind the namespace. Without the brand owner, a trademark TLD produces no royalty income and serves no operational function. The holder has an asset, and that asset earns nothing while it is inactive.

The second reason is legal caution. A holder who markets names under a string that matches a mark invites questions under trademark and unfair competition law that a holder who simply keeps the token is less likely to face. Inactivity does not settle the holder’s legal position, which depends on the country and the facts, but it keeps the holding out of commerce.

The third reason is that waiting costs nothing. With no renewal fee and no expiry, a holder can keep a TLD indefinitely without making any decision about it. Long inactivity is therefore what the structure of the asset would lead you to expect. It is not, by itself, a sign of bad faith, and it is not a sign that the holder has forgotten the name either.

One consequence follows for the organization. In the DNS, a common response to an unused name held by a third party is to wait for the registration to lapse and pick the name up when it does. That strategy has no equivalent for a TLD without a renewal fee. The registration does not run out, so the position changes only if the holder acts or the TLD changes hands.

A second consequence is that inactivity describes the present state of a TLD, not a property of it. Support for onchain names in wallets and browsers is partial and changes over time, and it can widen or narrow. A brand owner does not need to forecast that. It is enough to know that an inactive TLD is one the holder could activate, and to keep the name on the list of things the brand protection function looks at from time to time.

What the situation means for the organization

An organization that learns its name exists as a TLD in a wallet it does not control faces a position that is unfamiliar but can be analyzed. Three questions, taken in order, organize the thinking.

The first question is factual. The registry record is public, and anyone can look it up on a block explorer, a website that displays the contents of a public blockchain. The record shows that a TLD exists and which wallet address holds it. It does not show the name of a person or a company, and a wallet address should not be read as one. The first task is therefore modest: establish which strings matter to the organization, and whether each one is registered as a TLD. The site’s free tools include a Namespace Exposure Score, which scores how exposed a brand is onchain.

The second question is strategic. The organization decides whether the onchain namespace for its brand matters to it, and on what timeline. That depends on how central the name is, on whether the TLD is being used, on what the law offers in the countries concerned, and on whether the organization has any plan of its own for an onchain namespace. Doing nothing and reviewing the position periodically is a legitimate outcome of that assessment. So is a decision to acquire the TLD, and so is a decision to take legal advice on remedies. These are choices for the organization and its counsel, and none of them is forced by the mere existence of the TLD.

The third question concerns coverage. A brand owner that manages its DNS portfolio carefully already knows where its name exists and who controls it there. Onchain namespaces sit alongside the DNS without replacing it, and they are a further place where the name can exist. Whether that place deserves a line in the brand protection program is a matter of proportion: for some organizations it will, for others a periodic check is enough. The page for brands and legal teams develops this further.

It helps to keep internal communication equally measured. A matching TLD is easy to describe in dramatic terms to a board or a management team, and the dramatic version is usually wrong. The accurate version is short: a token exists, it gives its holder control of a namespace that works in limited software, it has no effect on the organization’s domains or marks, and the organization has time to decide what, if anything, to do.

What the situation means for the holder

This article is addressed mainly to brand owners and their advisers, but a complete account of the phenomenon also describes the holder’s position plainly.

A holder of a trademark TLD holds a token that the registry record attributes to the holder’s wallet. In the registry’s own terms, that is the whole of the matter. In legal terms it is only the start. Whether the holding gives rise to liability depends on what the holder does with it, in which countries, under which trademark laws, and on how a court assesses the facts. That analysis is specific to each case. This article gives information, not advice, and a holder with concerns about a position should take advice from counsel.

The economic position is a separate question. The party most likely to have a use for a trademark TLD is the organization whose name it matches, because that organization is the one that could build a namespace under it. That is a description of who might be interested, not a claim on anyone. The organization is under no obligation to respond to an approach, to buy, or to treat the TLD as something it needs. A holder who understands this reads the asset more accurately: its value depends on one potential counterparty’s free decision, and on little else.

The obstacles to a sale are largely informational. A holder may not know whether the organization has any interest in an onchain namespace, how to raise the subject in a way that is professional and creates no misunderstanding, or how to think about value. Two things on the site address the last point: the TLD Readiness Score, a free tool that scores how ready a TLD is to be sold, and the possibility for a holder to request a private valuation.

Conduct matters as much as price. Putting a trademark TLD to use in a way that suggests affiliation with the brand, or that confuses the brand’s customers, changes the legal character of the holding and closes the door on a sensible conversation. A holder who keeps the TLD inactive, describes it accurately and accepts a refusal as an answer keeps every option open.

How trademark TLDs change hands

The transfer of an onchain TLD works differently from the transfer of a domain name, and the differences matter for both sides.

In the DNS, a transfer runs through registrars, which update the registration record under standardized rules. Onchain, a transfer means moving the TLD token from one wallet to another. Once the transaction is confirmed on the blockchain, there is no registrar to appeal to and no administrative way to reverse it. The new holder stands exactly where the previous holder stood, with control of the namespace and of every name that may be issued under it.

That finality raises the question of who performs first: a buyer does not want to pay before the token moves, and a seller does not want to move the token before being paid. Escrow answers it. The sale of a TLD through the desk closes in onchain escrow on an aftermarket, and the escrow and transfer page describes that stage.

The path to a transfer usually begins with a note. An organization may write to a holder, a holder may write to an organization, or either may mandate an intermediary to make the approach. In each case the receiving party is free to answer or not. The transaction involves an unfamiliar kind of asset and legal questions that touch trademark law, contract law and the terms of the registry, so both sides are generally well served by advisers who know how an onchain transfer works.

A transfer is also the point at which the two categories in the first table meet. Once the organization that owns the mark holds the TLD, the tension that defined a trademark TLD is gone: the string and the trademark record point to the same owner. What the organization then does with the namespace is a separate set of decisions. Issuing names under it, using it for wallet addresses or for websites, or simply holding it so that no names are issued are all possible, and the last is a legitimate choice.

Where to go from here

If you are a brand owner or an adviser, the logical next step is to establish the facts for the names that matter to your organization. The trademark TLDs page linked in the first section holds a free Trademark Name Check form for that purpose.

If you then want to understand what an acquisition involves, the brand namespace recovery page describes that service. If you are a holder, the page on sell-side mandates describes how a holder mandates the desk to find a buyer.

Hush Partners is a private desk for onchain TLDs. It works 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 every exchange, and a single named partner stays with a file from the first note through to closing. If your organization has received a note from the desk, the received a note page is written for that situation.

Questions people ask

Does a registered trademark give its owner the matching onchain TLD?

No. A trademark registration gives rights against certain uses of a sign in commerce, in the countries and for the goods and services it covers. It does not operate as a reservation in an onchain registry, and registration of the TLD by someone else does not, on that fact alone, tell you whether a trademark has been infringed. That depends on what is done with the TLD and on the law of the country concerned, which is why the question goes to your own counsel.

What happens if the holder does not answer an approach?

Nothing changes. The holder keeps the TLD, and the organization keeps every option it had before: to leave the matter there, to review it later, or to take legal advice on whether any remedy is available. A holder is entitled not to sell, in the same way that an organization is entitled not to buy.

Does partial resolution make the holding insignificant?

It limits the practical effect, since a name that few programs can read reaches few people. It does not change who controls the namespace. Because support in wallets and browsers changes over time, the sensible course is to note the limit honestly and to revisit the question periodically instead of treating either the limit or its disappearance as certain.