.BANK Doing Surprisingly Well in Sunrise

The forthcoming .bank gTLD has received over 700 applications for domains during its sunrise period, according to the registry.

fTLD Registry Services tweeted the stat earlier this week:

Its sunrise period doesn’t even end until June 17. Sunrise periods tend to be back-weighted, so the number could get a lot higher.

Seven hundred may not sound like a lot — and applications do not always convert to registrations — but in the context of new gTLDs it’s very high.

Discounting .porn and .adult, both of which racked up thousands of names across their various sunrise phases, the previous high for a sunrise was .london, with just over 800 names registered.

It’s not unusual for a sunrise to get under 100 names. A year ago, I calculated that the average was 144.

The 700+ .bank number is especially surprising as it’s going to be a very tightly controlled gTLD where the chance of cybersquatting is going to be virtually nil.

All .bank registrants will be manually vetted to ensure they really are banks, substantially mitigating the need for defensive registrations.

Could this be an indication that .bank will actually get used?

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