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Founder Matthew Gould said the cost of taking web3 strings through ICANN was higher than what the company expected to recover in sales, six months after telling customers it would apply for all six of its original extensions.
By:The Defiant Team•
NFTs & Web3
Unstoppable Domains did not file applications for its web3 top-level domains in ICANN’s 2026 expansion round and is refunding customers who bought names under them, founder Matthew Gould said on Wednesday.
The decision ends the promise the company had made to holders since 2019: that names like .crypto and .wallet would one day resolve in ordinary browsers, the way .com does.
Six months ago Unstoppable said it would apply. “We’ve confirmed our intent to submit applications for all of these Unstoppable Originals in ICANN’s upcoming gTLD round, representing their next evolution,” the company wrote on Feb. 17, naming .ZIL, .Crypto, .Wallet, .NFT, .<a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/bitcoin-prices-fall-back-down-to-78k-why-is-the-rally-hitting-a-wall/” title=”Bitcoin prices fall back down to $78K. Why is the rally hitting a wall?”>Bitcoin and .DAO.
“The cost of taking web3 domains through icann in both compliance and application and bidding is higher than what we believe we’d recover in sales,” Gould wrote. “It is a better decision to refund people since we made the icann pivot than it is to proceed through icann. And the time to make that decision was now since the applications are due.”
Window Closed Aug. 12
ICANN’s application window opened on April 30 and closed on Aug. 12 with more than 1,600 primary applications, according to the organization. Evaluation fees were due by Aug. 19. ICANN said it expects to announce the date of Reveal Day, when the applied-for strings become public, in mid-September, and to publish the applications no later than nine weeks after the window closed.
Gould said customers were told by email. “We didn’t apply and are refunding as we communicated in emails over the last 24 hours,” he wrote. He did not publish the list of affected extensions or the refund terms.
Holders describe getting a list on Aug. 25. Unstoppable’s February blog post on web3 refunds now redirects to a login page, unstoppabledomains.com redirects to unstoppable.ai, and the company’s X account describes itself as “the agentic workspace & IDE that keeps your team on the frontier.”
Small And Niche
Gould’s case rests on the size of the market. “I think a lot of people have an inflated sense of the web3 market since the 2021 crypto nft bubble. It is small. It is niche. And we do not believe it can support our multiple generic TLDs in this round,” he wrote. “People here can argue all they want, but we have the actual sales numbers to support our business decision.”
Public numbers from the sector’s largest naming protocol point the same way. Ethereum Name Service collected $315,013 in registration and renewal fees over the past 30 days and about $4.04 million on a trailing-twelve-month basis, per DefiLlama, against $112.51 million in cumulative fees since its 2019 launch. Its best quarter was the second of 2022, at $20.6 million.
Unstoppable had been shedding web3 extensions for a year before Wednesday. Its support pages list dozens of partner strings whose operators confirmed they would not go to ICANN, with refunds in September and December 2025 and a second window from Feb. 16 to March 2 covering .pengu, .pudgy, .sonic, .ltc and others. Several of those extensions had been launched with an ICANN application as the selling point, among them .AGI with the 0G Foundation, which was to “apply for an ICANN gTLD in the 2026 round.”
Holders Want Cash Back
Buyers are contesting the scope of the refunds. “This is a complete betrayal of the vision that’s been spoken about for years. Refunds need to be available for all UD domains that are not proceeding. People held onto them, on the basis that UD was carrying forward to ICANN,” wrote the holder posting as 00.x on Tuesday, who said in a later reply to Gould that he had turned down offers on that basis.
“We bought some of these as far back as 2021. Can we get refunds?” asked Jeffrey Peterson. A holder posting as fastfwd.crypto demanded refunds “on all the domains you listed yesterday you’re not applying for Icaan for,” adding that “we couldn’t make a decision on a refund till we seen the applications. You didn’t apply for not even one.”
Gould said the tokens keep working as they did. “The web3 domains will remain as onchain assets for crypto transactions as they have always been,” he wrote.
Still Filing For Others
Unstoppable stays in the ICANN business as a service provider. Gould posted on Aug. 18 that he was “excited to work with @telegram on their .gram tld string,” and the company said in 2024 that it had supported more than 19 web3 companies preparing 2026 applications after winning registrar accreditation. Gould said in March that DNS names were already “90%+ of our business” and that web3-only domains “were part of the crypto craze in 2021 but did not cross the chasm into mainstream usage.”
ENS took the other route into the same round. Tokenholders approved a restructured ENS Foundation on Aug. 11 with a mandate to “pursue recognition and stewardship of the .ens TLD at ICANN.” ENS is not applying for .eth, which ICANN reserves because it is an ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code. ENS Labs has said the .ens bid “is not driven by revenue potential, but by the desire to protect the ENS brand,” with delegation possible no earlier than 2028.
The two have fought over the naming business before, including when ENS challenged Unstoppable to open its blockchain domain patents in 2023.
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Source: thedefiant.io