.Com, .Net, .Gov. Next: .Shib?
That’s the dream, anyway, of the team behind the dog-themed Shiba Inu (SHIB) crypto ecosystem, which announced Tuesday that it plans to apply for a .shib top-level-domain (TLD) with ICANN, the nonprofit that maintains numerous aspects of the internet.
While organizations such as the Ethereum Name Service and companies like Unstoppable Domains already offer crypto users the ability to claim domain names ending like .eth or .crypto, those domains can be directed to crypto wallets—not websites accessible through any traditional browser.
Such innovations have certainly helped streamline online identities in the age of multi-dozen character wallet addresses. But no crypto-themed name—with ownership represented via an NFT—currently connects to the Domain Name System (DNS), which governs basic internet functions including website names and email addresses.
SHIB now seeks to change this—and become the first crypto domain to permeate the mainstream internet. To do so, the ecosystem has partnered with D3 Global, a digital infrastructure provider, to help make Shiba Inu’s application for a TLD as compelling as possible.
“Our partnership with D3 allows us to scale outside of the existing #ShibArmy and give over 5 billion internet users direct access to the SHIB ecosystem,” Shytoshi Kusama, Shiba Inu’s Lead Developer, said in a statement. “Bringing real domains to SHIB is a big deal, expanding our vision for digital identities within our decentralized ecosystem, while driving long-term revenue generation within the ecosystem.”
It will be quite a while before SHIB learns whether its application is successful. The last time ICANN opened applications for new top-level-domains was back in 2012, in an application cycle that brought about tech favorites such as .xyz and .app (.ai, which technically refers to the Caribbean island Anguilla, has been around since 1995). The organization’s next application cycle for TLDs, recently announced, is set to open in spring 2026.
It might take years more after that date for the SHIB domain to gain approval and implementation—an outcome that is not guaranteed. Despite this, Shiba Inu is already letting users sign up for early access to the theoretical service and claim their SHIB names.
If Shiba Inu does (eventually) get this right, though, the feat would constitute a major boon for the Ethereum token’s growing crypto ecosystem, which counts among its features the $6 billion meme coin SHIB, a layer-2 blockchain, Shibarium, and a (currently crypto-exclusive) naming service. It would functionally integrate traditional and Web3 systems of online organization, and in doing so, Shiba Inu hopes, rapidly accelerate the widespread adoption of Web3 identities.
Edited by Andrew Hayward