Pioneering Attorney Paul Keating - One of the World's First Lawyers to Specialize in Domain Related Issues - Has Passed

It's a dreary, rainy day in Florida today, one that turned even more somber and gray upon hearing that we've lost another one of the key players in domain industry history - legendary attorney Paul Keating. The sad news came from one of Paul's long-time friends, Freddy Schiwek, who let me know that Paul had passed after a battle with cancer that he has been fighting for several years now. 

I first met Paul in 2005 at the 2nd ever TRAFFIC domain conference in Florida and, like everyone else (who wasn't on the opposite side of a legal case against him) took an immediate liking to him. He always seemed calm, cool and collected in a Robert Redford kind of way and easily made friends wherever he went - and he went everywhere! I wound up writing a DNJournal Cover Story about him in 2013 titled Have Gavel Will Travel: How Globe-Trotting Domain Defender Paul Keating Became One of the Industry's Top Attorneys.

Paul Keating speaking at the 
2006 TRAFFIC Silicon Valley conference.

Paul traveled the world throughout the legal and entrepreneurial career that followed. The same year he became a domain attorney, 2003, he moved to Spain where his wife Victoria, also an attorney, was from. They had met five years earlier when she came to San Francisco to study English and the U.S. legal system.  While he was an American living in Europe (as well as London for a few years), Paul's client list quickly stretched beyond both continents, located as far away as Africa, Australia, the Philippines and Turkey. 

Meanwhile, Paul's persuasive arguments in UDRP cases played an instrumental role in transforming the process from a deck stacked against domain owners into one that immensely strengthened their rights and prevented the loss of invaluable assets over the past 20 years. For details on that, a Memoriam for Paul written by his friend and fellow attorney, ICA General Counsel Zak  Muscovitch (posted by Gina Aubrey on the Internet Commerce Association blog), is a must read. 

With so many friends around the world, the news of Paul's passing will be reaching people at different times as they wake up across the various time zones. However, the reaction will be the same - sad to hear another one of the great ones is gone but thankful to have been among the lucky few that crossed paths with Paul Keating while he was here. Rest in Peace old friend.

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Source.ai Sold for $200,000 in Sale Produced Through New Union of Fruits.co and OpusDNS 

Just a couple of months ago, new registrar OpusDNS (launched last October by Hakan Ali and Robbie Birkner) announced the acquisition of rapidly growing domain sales and  monetization platform fruits.co. Today the new union showed how bountiful it could be by producing a $200,000 sale Source.ai. 

Working on a referral from OpusDNS, fruits.co brokered the sale that ranks among the five biggest .ai transactions reported so far this year. We will be adding it to our YTD Top 100 Chart when our next bi-weekly domain sales report is released August 5. At the moment it is one of top 6 for 2026.

OpusDNS CEO Europe Hakan Ali said, "With the acquisition of fruits, we wanted to offer our customers significantly more than traditional registrar services. Today, many companies are not just looking for a registrar, but also for support in acquiring strategically important

Image from Bigstock 

domain names. This combination is precisely what we now offer from a single source. Being able to facilitate a transaction of this scale so soon after joining forces demonstrates the potential of our partnership.”

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Andrew Allemann and Ron Jackson Dig Into 2026's Biggest Reported Domain Sales in New DNW Podcast

Halfway through the 2026 domain sales season, aftermarket activity is looking good. With the first six months of the year now in the books, Domain Name Wire Founder Andrew Allemann had DNJournal Editor & Publisher Ron Jackson join him for the 597th DNW podcast to take a closer look at the biggest publicly reported sales of the year to date, including how they are being used (and in some cases not used) right now. 

To me, the fact that Andrew is closing in on 600 podcasts since he started the series back in October 2014 is just as impressive the top tier sales we talked about - with the exception of one, the all-time record sale of AI.com at $70 million that effectively stole the spotlight from everyone. 

That unprecedented sale also wildly skewed 1H-2026's total $ sales volume figure, pushing it far above any ever reported. However, if you take that one domain out of the mix, total sales in 1H-2026 would still by running about 15% ahead of the first half of last year.  

Andrew Allemann (L) & Ron Jackson

Keep in mind, we are still only seeing a small fraction of the overall market as most of the biggest sales are subject to NDAs and thousands of others are sold privately or through platforms that do not share their sales data (there are valid reasons both for and against making data public so it's a decision that buyers, sellers and sales venues have to weigh and decide for themselves).

While no one knows what the full picture looks like, we do learn a lot from what does get reported, as I think will be apparent if you listen to the brisk 35-minute DNW conversation. The hottest keywords and latest trends can be seen in those sales. 

Of course, AI has been an overwhelmingly dominant theme and we talked about that, including the possibility that's AI's dominance will become so interwoven with everything we do that it will no longer need to be referenced so often in domain names. If that happened it would have an especially big impact on the .ai ccTLD that has become white hot thanks to the artificial intelligence revolution. 

Of course, none of us can be certain about the future but it's always interesting to talk about it, so we hope you'll enjoy the discussion. In the meantime, someone needs to start thinking about where to get a cake big enough to accommodate 600 candles to mark DNW's upcoming podcast milestone!

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Radix Reports a Record Breaking Half for Premium Domain Name Registrations in 1H-2026

Things seem to be looking up everywhere you turn in the domain business - both in new registrations and renewals and domain aftermarket sales. Verisign just reported the total number of domain registrations worldwide (including all TLDs) crossed the 400 million mark for the first time at the end of 2Q-2026.

Now comes word from Radix (the administrator of 11 top level domains) that high end premium domain registrations there produced record high sales for a single half in 1H-2026 (full .pdf report). While the company doesn't report total $ volume, the latest update said revenue from 4,424 premium sales shot up 50% year year. 

.Tech was their leading TLD with 1,229 registrations, followed by .space (889), .fun (636), .online (509) and .store at 485. Radix added that demand was strong across all price points with 112 registrations commanding $5,000 per year, 37 drawing $10,000 annually and two at $25,000. .Space produced the highest percentage jump from the previous half, landing 34% above the TLD's 2H-2025 total.

There was good news on the renewal front too. The first year renewal rate came in at 51% then jumped dramatically from that starting point. After the second year, 73% of premium names were renewed and for subsequent renewals the rate soared to 84%.

One 1H-2026 moment Radix is especially proud of was seeing IQM Quantum Computers (iqm.tech) become the first European quantum computing company to list on a major US exchange with a Nasdaq debut for IQMX valuing the company at roughly $1.8 billion. IQM went public on iqm.tech, upgrading from meetiqm.com to an exact-match domain.

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Global Domain Name Registrations Soar Past the 400 Million Mark According to New Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief

VeriSign, (the administrator of the .com and .net TLDs) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) covering the 2nd quarter of 2026. This update showed that the total number of domain registrations across all TLDs worldwide passed the 400 million mark for the first time with  2Q-2026 closing at 401.6 million registrations. 29.9 million domains were added over the past year, representing a robust 8.1% surge year over year.

.Com, by far, the dominant TLD on the Internet, ended the latest quarter with 166.6 million registered domains, up 8.7 million YOY, a 5.5% increase since the same point a year ago. Meanwhile, .Net continued to tread water with a slight dip from 12.6 million registrations last year to 12.5 million at the end of 2Q-2026.

ccTLDs finished the latest quarter with 14.6million registrations, 5.2 million more than a year ago, representing a 3.6% increase YOY. That rate is 33% higher than the 2.4% year over year gain reported at the end of the first quarter this year. 

New gTLDs, working from a smaller user base, continued to rack up impressive gains percentage wise. With 52.9 million registrations at the end of 2Q-2026, the new G's were up an eye popping 34% after adding 13.4 million domains over the past year.

For legacy gTLDs not including .com and .net (a group dominated by .org that also includes older TLDs that were released prior to the beginning of ICANN's new gTLD program in 2012 like .info and .biz), registrations stood at 21.0 million at the end of the latest quarter. That is up 2.7 million domains from a year ago. That translates to a nice double digit increase of 14.9% year over year.

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OpusDNS Ignites Free-For-All While Atom.com Offers Cure For Domain Owner Verification Blues

There's some notable news from two of the domain industry's most innovative companies today. Last fall we told you about the launch of a new registrar, OpusDNS, founded by a two of the industry's most experienced and respected veterans - Hakan Ali and Robbie Birkner. The company began with four different price and service levels so customers could choose the combination that worked best for them. Those started with the basic free level with very competitive pricing but also included additional plans for large scale individual investors and companies, culminating with an Enterprise level with super low prices and white glove service at around $300 a month. However, OpusDNS has just chucked the fee structure entirely making the platform free for all. The interesting thing is that isn't just free going forward, it's free retroactively to January 1, 2026. That means those who have had paid plans will be getting refunds as high as around $2,000 depending on their plan.

Robbie Birkner (left) & Hakan Ali
OpusDNS Founders

So why do this now? In the company's latest newsletter, OpusDNS credited fast growth for making it possible, noting, "Since launch, over 350 customers have been managing more than 250,000 domains through our platform. We would like to sincerely thank you for the trust placed in us. As a token of our appreciation, we have made an important decision to eliminate the monthly platform fee. While the market is currently shaped by new platform fees, minimum revenue requirements, and hidden costs, we are deliberately taking the opposite approach. We believe a modern registrar platform should be sustained by satisfied partners, not by artificial barriers."

For sellers Atom said "it requires just one click inside the account you already control. No TXT records, no propagation wait, and because verification never touches DNS, it works no matter where your name servers point. Listing on an additional marketplace no longer means re-delegating, waiting, and going dark. Also, acquired domains list immediately. A current attestation supersedes any previous owner’s stale verification, so buying a domain that was listed elsewhere no longer means support tickets to displace someone else’s claim. Buyers get the mirror image: every listing backed by registrar-level proof of who controls the domain now, not who controlled it when the listing was created."  That sound like a slice of heaven to me.

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Latest Edition of GGRG.com's Liquid Market Report is Also a 10th Anniversary Landmark for Founder Giuseppe Graziano 

Giuseppe Graziano, the CEO and Founder of international domain brokerage and consultancy GGRG.com, burst onto the international domain scene like a Roman candle back in 2012 when he entered the industry as the Director of Business Development - Europe for the Domain Holdings Group. In the 14 years since then Giuseppe has established himself as one of the world's top domain brokers with multiple Escrow.com Master of Domains Awards ( for ranking among their global Top 10 in sales) to prove it.

He has also had high visibility roles as a speaker and moderator at major conferences, including this year's Nordic Domain Days event in Sweden and as a commentator in many of our annual State of the Industry reports. However, Giuseppe is  probably most widely known for his quarterly Liquid Market Report, a publication that just reached a major milestone of its own.

The latest edition of the Liquid Market Report, covering the 2nd quarter of 2026, is a special one because this 40th edition also marks the 10th anniversary of the publication - a level of consistency that, coupled with its unique focus, has made it a highly anticipated quarterly read among domain investors around the world.

Unlike other market reports and analysis, the Liquid Market Report covers an important subset of the overall aftermarket - short acronym and numeric domains - that, due to steady demand, tend to have more liquidity than most other domain categories. These are .com domains comprised of 2-4 letters, 2-5 numbers or a combination of 2-3 characters mixing letters and numbers. Taken as whole, that "liquid" universe includes 614,928 .com domains.

To give you an idea of the kind of data the Liquid Market Report uncovers, here are some of the highlights from the latest quarterly edition for 2Q-2026:

*Public disclosed sales rose 53.01%, reaching $7.82M, showing a meaningful rebound in reported liquid domain transactions.

*Escrow.com sales came in at $16.36M, down 35.95%, but still more than double the public market total, confirming that most liquid domain activity remains private.

*3L and 4L .coms dominated again across both channels, with 4L leading escrow volume and 3L close behind, reinforcing their position as the core of the liquid market.

*Public sales were highly concentrated, with 3L and 4L .coms making up the bulk of disclosed volume while most other liquid categories remained thinly traded.

*2L domains remain the most developed category by far, with nearly 30% in active use, continuing to signal deep end-user adoption and long-term scarcity value.

*2C domains continued to stand out in development as well, at roughly 18%, placing them surprisingly close to 3L .coms and ahead of most numeric categories.

*Over the past 12 months, public equities sharply outperformed liquid domains, with NASDAQ, SPX, and GLD all up more than 20%, while 4L .coms were flat and 5N .coms declined 8%.

If you would like to directly receive the free quarterly Liquid Domin Reports, you can just enter your email address on the report home page.

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URLs.com Contest Offers Chance to Turn Pain from a Lost Domain Into a Financial Gain

If you have been in the domain business for any length of time you probably have painful memories of the domain that got away. You might has accidentally let a valuable domain expire or passed up an opportunity to buy a name that someone else sold for 100 times more than you could have imagined. A lot of things can lead to a valuable name slipping out of your grasp but the end results is always the some - a wish that you could get that one back! Odds are that will never happen but at least you now have a chance to turn the pain into a monetary gain thanks to a free new online "Domain That Got Away" Contest put together by URLs.com and a group of sponsors who want to help ease your suffering!

All they want from domain investors, entrepreneurs and creators are the stories about how your big domain fish slipped the hook and swam away. Was it lost due to expiration, a domain dispute or theft, failed negotiations, exiting an auction too soon, or some other star-crossed turn of events? URLs.com Founder and Broker-in-Chief Jeff Garbutt noted, “The best domain stories usually come with a little pain, a little comedy, and a lesson someone else can use. This contest gives people a reason to tell those stories, and maybe get something back from the one that got away. Entries are limited to one per person with the most compelling recollections reaping the rewards. 

First Prize includes $500 in cash + $500 in Spaceship account credits, a Countersign one-year team subscription, a DomDB Tycoon subscription, a URLs.com brokerage consultation, domain appraisal and discounted commission and a 30-minute consultation with attorney Jeff Neuman (JJN Solutions) who, we can personally attest, is one of the sharpest, most experienced people in the entire industry. Second prize includes a $25 Dynadot credit and a URLs.om appraisal.

The contest is open now and entries will be accepted through September 22, 2026 at at URLs.com/lost-domain-contest/ where you will find a convenient entry form. 

All entries need to follow these guidelines: 

• be original; 
• be in English;
• be substantially truthful to the best of entrant’s knowledge;
• fit the Contest theme;
• not contain obscene, defamatory, infringing, fraudulent, deceptive, hateful, or unlawful material;
• not violate any third-party right, including copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or contractual rights; and
• comply with these Official Contest Terms.

Good luck and let the healing begin!

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