Every category extension began as something else.
The domain market is larger and busier than its headlines, the supply of memorable .com names is shrinking, and founders are choosing custom and frontier extensions more often every year. The extensions they choose follow a pattern that has repeated for twenty-five years: a country code gets re-read as a category, founders adopt it, and the aftermarket notices years later. Namehold exists to be early to the next one.
A market that clears above $1 billion a year
Three lenses describe the secondary market for domains. Publicly reported sales, tracked by NameBio, reached more than $244M across about 190,300 sales in 2025, up 31.9%, and the first half of 2026 added $146M, the strongest first half on record. GoDaddy's aftermarket alone booked about $510M a year. Escrow.com settled $395M of domain transactions in 2025, with its .ai volume up 189%. Atom.com's revenue grew nearly 70% in 2025, with .ai and other non-.com extensions reaching almost a third of it.
Good .com names are running out
The supply of memorable .com names is fixed. Brokers report that premium one-word .com inventory "continues to shrink, driving their values even higher". The price needed to enter DNJournal's Top 100 doubled from $50,000 in 2023 to about $100,000 in 2025. The lowest reported three-letter .com sale in five years was $75,500. The largest sale ever recorded, AI.com at $70M, closed in 2025 and was announced with a Super Bowl advertisement. Companies that outgrow a frontier extension pay these prices to upgrade, which is one more buyer for a shrinking pool.
| Year | Largest sale | Price | Top .ai sale | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Chat.com | $15,500,000 | You.ai | $700,000 |
| 2024 | Rocket.com | $14,000,000 | Girlfriend.ai | $274,610 |
| 2025 | Icon.com | $12,000,000 | Wisdom.ai | $750,000 |
| 2026 to date | AI.com | $70,000,000 | Bot.ai | $1,200,000 |
Buyers are moving beyond .com
By the first half of 2025, 54% of YC and Techstars startups launched on a non-traditional extension and 28% chose .ai. .com's share of DNJournal's Top 100 fell from 90 entries in 2021 to 51 in 2024, while .ai went from a single entry a year to 21. New-extension registrations grew 34% in the year to June 2026 against 5.5% for .com, and .ai passed a million names in January 2026. Sedo's average .ai sale was about $11,000 against $2,753 across all extensions.
.ai entries in DNJournal's annual Top 100
How a country code becomes a category
The pattern has four steps: an open registry that anyone can use, a two-letter code that reads as a category, founders who adopt it years before anyone else, and an end-user sale before the crowd arrives. It also has a failure mode: when the operator rather than the code is the weak point, millions of names can vanish.
| Extension | Country | Read as | How it happened | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| .tv | Tuvalu | Television | Opened to the world in 1998; Verisign paid $50M for the rights in 2000 | About 500,000 sites; close to a tenth of Tuvalu's GDP |
| .io | British Indian Ocean Territory | Input/output | Adopted by startups during the 2010s for its computing connotation | About 1.6M names; a retirement path exists if the country code is withdrawn after the Chagos transfer |
| .ai | Anguilla | Artificial intelligence | About 50,000 registrations a year by 2018; Google treated it as generic in 2021; ChatGPT in November 2022 opened the floodgates | More than 1M names; about $85–90M of government revenue in 2025 |
| .ad | Andorra | Advertising | Restricted to residents and trademark holders until 2024; open to anyone since 22 October 2024 | Early |
| .si | Slovenia | Superintelligence | Open to anyone, run by ARNES since 1992 at about €10 wholesale; investors buying from early 2026; first end-user sale in May; the term entered official use on 22 September 2026 | 186,337 names in June 2026 and 361,711 on 9 October |
| .ml .ga .cf .gq .tk | Mali, Gabon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Tokelau | Free domains | Given away free by Freenom; sued by Meta for cybersquatting in March 2023; Mali and Gabon took their codes back | Web-facing .ga sites fell from 5.3M to 2,601 in three months; Freenom left the business in February 2024 |
.si, read as superintelligence
Investors began buying .si as shorthand for "superintelligence" in early 2026. Recursive, an AI startup valued at $4.65B, paid $20,000 for Recursive.si in May. On 22 September 2026 the US administration began calling artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence", and the registry that had taken 34 years to reach 186,000 names added more than 170,000 in the following five weeks.
.si registered domains, 2026
- An open registry with no residency rule, run by a stable operator with public pricing. ARNES is Slovenia's academic network, and .si is a sovereign code.
- A renewal in ordinary territory, about €10–$20 a year, so a thesis can be held for years at trivial cost.
- A category in which companies are actually being formed, and at least one end-user purchase before the crowd. Recursive.si came four months before the trigger.
- Two letters that abbreviate the category and work in a logo.
- Google still treats .si as Slovenian for search. Reclassification as generic, as happened to .ai in 2021, would matter.
- Many .si names mirror existing .ai names. We do not register names that collide with other companies' brands, and every name is screened for trademark conflicts before purchase.
- We never buy at retail into a running wave. Asking prices of $8M and $10M on one-word .si names are not comparable sales.
- We avoid extensions whose registry can reprice at will, and operators that have failed before.