icann

The stablecoin and payment company Frax, headquartered in the United States, announced that it has submitted an application for its own top-level domain .frax to ICANN, claiming this is the first top-level domain application from a cryptocurrency company published by ICANN. The application is part of the 2026 New Generic Top-Level Domain Program and is supported by ICANN-accredited corporate domain registrar MarkMonitor. If approved, .frax will become a global internet top-level domain similar to .com and .org.Frax plans to allow users to own and manage .frax domain names on its blockchain Fraxtal through the Frax Name Service, while being resolved via the global domain name system. Related registrations will enter the Frax Burn Engine and permanently destroy FRAX. Founder Sam Kazemian stated: the cryptocurrency naming system allows internet identities to be owned, ICANN domains make them universally accessible, and .frax combines both, aiming for ownership to remain on-chain, domain names to be universally available, and to become programmable financial endpoints for people, businesses, applications, and AI agents.The plan will also extend Frax's financial network built around the fully-backed digital dollar frxUSD and the institutional connectivity platform FraxNet. Frax plans to explore the agency and machine payment functionalities of .frax domain names, including support for standards like x402, so that websites, applications, and autonomous software agents can identify counterparties, access services, and programmatically initiate stablecoin payments. Frax claims to have been serving users since 2020 and ranks 5th in the 2026 Fortune Crypto 100 stablecoin category.

Matthew Gould, the founder of Unstoppable Domains, stated that the company did not submit an application for its Web3 top-level domains in ICANN's 2026 expansion round and will refund customers who purchased related domains. Gould mentioned that the compliance, application, and bidding costs of incorporating Web3 domains into the ICANN system exceeded the company's expected recoverable sales. This move ends the company's commitment since 2019 that domains like .crypto and .wallet would eventually be resolvable in standard browsers.The application window for this round of ICANN opened on April 30 and closed on August 12, receiving over 1,600 major applications. Gould stated that customers have been notified via email, but the list of affected extensions and refund terms have not been disclosed. Some holders questioned the scope of the refunds, claiming they held the domains based on Unstoppable's commitment to advance the ICANN application. Gould responded that Web3 domains will still serve as on-chain assets for cryptocurrency transactions.Unstoppable continues to participate in ICANN activities as a service provider and previously announced a partnership with Telegram to apply for the .gram domain. Meanwhile, ENS has chosen a different path, with token holders approving the restructuring of the ENS Foundation to pursue the .ens top-level domain in ICANN, but ENS will not apply for .eth, as it is reserved for ISO 3166-1 country codes.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated that Telegram has applied to ICANN for the .gram domain zone. If the application is approved, approximately one billion Telegram users will be able to obtain exclusive second-level domains, such as yourname.gram.Users will be able to quickly build interactive websites under Telegram's hosting with a single prompt. This initiative aims to further expand Telegram's ecological service capabilities, combining instant messaging with personal domains and website hosting.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), stated that if he were to build the Domain Name System (DNS) today, he would make it "more decentralized."Tim Berners-Lee believes that the current high centralization of DNS, especially in the management of top-level domains, makes it vulnerable to censorship and control. For example, the root domain is managed by the U.S. nonprofit organization ICANN, and the most authoritative servers are operated by a few entities. This centralization brings potential issues of censorship and privacy.

ChainCatcher news, Unstoppable Domains has received certification from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which enables the company to offer traditional domain suffixes such as generic top-level domains (gTLD) and country code top-level domains (ccTLD), while integrating blockchain functionality into these domains. This move is expected to bridge the gap between traditional internet infrastructure and decentralized Web3 innovations.Unstoppable Domains also revealed that it will launch new services, including an on-chain domain marketplace and tools for managing tokenized domains.