Two time windows are opening simultaneously – the launch of .dot Sunrise and the 21-day countdown to ICANN's new round of operations.

On July 21, 2026, .dot officially launched Sunrise.

What makes this domain suffix special is that it uses one of the most fundamental symbols of the internet—a "dot." The registry Dish DBS has given it an ambitious positioning: "Born for creators." Products, brands, communities, and creative projects can all be expressed using .dot.

Even more noteworthy is the Sunrise mechanism: Dish adopts a First Come, First Serve model, rather than the industry-standard pure trademark priority model. This means that even if you haven't registered a trademark, as long as you complete trademark registration and add it to the TMCH database before October 19th, you have the opportunity to preemptively register your brand name. The 89-day window is a crucial period for investors to carefully calculate.

However, Dish's first gTLD launched this year, .latino, performed poorly—one month after GA, the Zone File only had about 800 domains. Whether .dot can follow a different trajectory will be revealed after GA on November 2nd.

Meanwhile, the real industry drama is counting down.

The application window for ICANN's 2026 new round of gTLDs closes in just 21 days (August 12th).

Key figures to date:

365 string intent reports, covering 313 unique strings

41 strings facing competing applications

Base application fee: $227,000 (approximately 1.63 million RMB)

October Reveal Day: ICANN will publicly release all formal applications at once, prohibiting applicants from negotiating privately thereafter.

This is not a trivial matter. Each new round of gTLD openings reshapes the value of a batch of domain names. The previous rounds of .ai, .app, and .dev applications all followed their own independent paths from application to implementation.

For investors, there are three key milestones to watch in the next three months:

① Date: August 3rd Event: ICANNEPP extended provisional deadline; applicants should pay close attention.

② Date: August 12th Event: New round of gTLD application deadline

③ Date: October Event: Reveal Day – the biggest information release day of the year.

The .dot sunrise is the prelude to the new gTLD era; August 12th is the main battleground.

Are you ready?