Tyler Mason, Senior Director of Strategy and Advisory at GoDaddy Corporate Domains (GCD) put together a list of domain extensions used by the “Top 100 NFT projects” ranked by volume, and he shared it on his LinkedIn page last week.
With Tyler’s permission, I embedded his post with the graph and his commentary:
Tyler used CryptoSlam as the source of his ranking data and Icy.Tools for the website information. It should be noted that there are more than 16,000 NFT projects (and growing), so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I case you can’t see the graphic, the top 5 most used extensions are:
- .com
- .io
- no website
- .co
- .xyz
Two things were a bit surprising to me. I did not expect there to be such a large percentage (26%) of .IO domain names. I know .IO domain names have been popular amongst NFT and general cryptocurrency projects, but I would not have guessed that they would be more than 25% of all projects. The second surprising thing is that 5 of the projects had no website at all.
It was not a surprise that .com was the leader on this chart. I think there is still a trust factor with .com domain names. Since most NFT projects got their start in the last year or so, many founders were probably faced with the choice of buying an aftermarket .com domain name at a premium price or registering an alternative extension. I am not involved in the NFT space, but I don’t think people penalize or look down upon projects that don’t use .com domain names, which is why more than half chose an alternative to .com.
What will be interesting is following these projects to see if the percentages change. As money continues to flow into the NFT space, will project founders choose to upgrade to .com or decide that getting the project brand match .com is not an important expense. It will also be interesting to track the top 100 projects going forward to see if new projects continue the trend of using alternate extensions. My guess is yes.
Thanks for sharing this Elliot, but too bad neither you, nor Tyler (from what I can see) disclosed the % of NFT projects using .COM domain names, but we know it is more than .IO (so more than 26% of all NFT projects). As you said: “It was not a surprise that .com was the leader on this chart. I think there is still a trust factor with .com domain names.” Yes, there is still a TRUST FACTOR with .COM [and some ccTLDs like .IO] BUT unfortunately, ALL new gTLDs are UNTRUSTWORTHY thanks to ICANN and the history of sudden exorbitant price increases and registry operators’ “premium pricing” in new gTLDs allowed (and even encouraged) by ICANN Org and its so-called “Global Domains Division” as well as the “usability issues” in new gTLDs which ICANN tried to hide from registrants and is supposedly belatedly addressing via its “Universal Acceptance” project. Even .ORG is now carrying the baggage of being UNTRUSTWORTHY after the attempted takeover led by former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade (with annual 10% price increases in .ORG registrations and renewals ad infinitum) which ICANN Org and its inept Board of Directors would have gladly approved but for the intervention by the California Attorney General.
If you expand the LinkedIn post, you can see that 43% of the 100 projects use .com domain names.
Thanks for the info Elliot. I am not a user of LinkedIn so I cannot access or “expand” the “post,” a common “problem” or “feature” for anyone who “posts” on social media. So almost 70% are using either .COM or .IO, interesting! So much for the lies used by ICANN (new gTLDs & “innovation”) to promote its new gTLDs. If you have an untrustworthy product, i.e., new gTLDs, don’t expect to be competitive in the marketplace!