Release schedule, bid limits, auction kinds, claims

How root names are released, and how they are auctioned

A root name is the part after the dot — the x in katarina.x. There are a lot of them, so they do not all go on sale at once. This page explains the order they open in, what a bid may cost, which of those limits the blockchain itself enforces and which are our policy, and how a company that already owns a domain claims the matching root.

1. About a hundred names a day, for three years. Then everything opens.

Every root name has a release date worked out from the name itself. Anyone can compute it, and nobody can change it or get an earlier one. Roughly a hundred names reach their date each day, and that continues for three years.

After those three years the schedule stops mattering: every remaining name opens to auction at once. We call that the pool. The only names that stay out of it are the ones that could never be auctioned anyway:

names reserved for someone — the 10,000 well-known sites, the names we hold for the services this protocol runs on, and the names held by the DAO;
names blocked outright — the 38,953 entries on the sanctions screen we apply, and the special-purpose names such as .onion, .local and .test that no naming system may sell;
names that match a TLD in the real DNS root zone, which are held for whoever operates the real one;
names somebody already owns. A name comes back only when its lease lapses.

The same rule runs our test networks, just faster. The release window there is five days instead of five years, so the drip lasts three days and the pool opens on day three. It is one rule — the drip takes the first 60% of whatever window is configured, and the pool takes the other 40% — so a rehearsal on the fast clock is a rehearsal of the real thing and not a different mechanism wearing its name.

The dates, as configured today

Clock	Release window	Drip ends, pool opens	Auction kinds start rotating
Live	5 years	after 3 years	after 4 years
Fast (testing)	5 days	after 3 days	after 4 days

Three years is exactly 60% of five, and four years is exactly 80% — which is why both are fractions of one window rather than three separate dates that could drift apart.

2. What a bid may cost — and who actually enforces it

There is a floor and a ceiling on what a bid is worth.

A minimum. A bid has to be worth something. If bidding were free, somebody would bid on everything. Putting a real cost on each attempt is the cheapest defence against that there is.
A maximum. Above a certain figure, extra money buys nothing. The point of a name is the thing somebody builds behind it, and we would rather a name went to a small team with a product than to whoever has the largest balance.

On the fast clock those figures are a minimum of one US dollar and a maximum of one hundred thousand. They are settings, not fixed features of the protocol, and they will change.

The honest part: a dollar limit is our rule, not the blockchain's

Chia has no idea what a dollar is. A Chia coin's rules can compare amounts of XCH and nothing else. So:

Limit	Enforced by	Could we break it?
The minimum, written in XCH	the coin's own rules — it is built into the escrow coin every bid pays into	No. Not us, not anyone.
The minimum, written in dollars	us, converting dollars to XCH when the auction opens	Yes — the conversion is ours
The maximum	us, when a bid is opened at the reveal	Yes — it is house policy

We convert the dollar figures into XCH once, at the moment an auction opens, and then that auction keeps those XCH numbers until it finishes. That way the minimum is a real rule of the coin for the whole auction, and the dollar figure can only drift for as long as one auction lasts rather than for years.

Because bids are sealed, we cannot see that a bid is over the maximum until it is opened. When one is, we count it as the maximum rather than throwing it out — throwing it out would cost the bidder their whole deposit for breaking a rule they were told about. They simply do not get credit for the part above the cap.

Anyone else running this protocol could set a different maximum, or none. The XCH minimum built into the escrow coin is the only limit that is not a matter of trusting an operator — and we would rather say so than let a page imply otherwise.

3. Four kinds of auction, taking turns

After four years the auction house stops running one kind of auction and starts rotating between four. Which one is running depends only on the clock, so anyone can work out today's kind and nobody gets a private one.

Kind	What it does	Who it suits
Fixed price	One minimum for the whole auction. The plain auction, and what runs today.	everyone
Falling price	The minimum starts high and falls as the auction runs.	patient bidders — wait and there is less to beat
Rising price	The minimum starts low and rises as the auction runs.	decisive bidders — bid early and cheaply
Capped	The ceiling drops to a fraction of the usual maximum.	small builders — a big balance cannot simply outbid you

By default each kind gets a day, and on the fast clock six hours. Both are settings.

Nothing about bidding changes between the kinds. You seal a bid, pay a deposit, and open it in the reveal window, in all four. What changes is the price your bid has to beat and when. We did it that way on purpose: a different kind of auction that needed a different way of bidding would mean two systems to learn and two to get right.

And a change of kind never reaches an auction that has already started. The kind is fixed when the auction opens, and it keeps it until it settles.

4. Keeping names out of the hands of squatters

Squatting is registering names you have no use for, to sell them back to whoever does. No naming system has solved it. These are the things we actually do, rather than the things that sound good:

The 10,000 best-known sites are reserved and claimable by their real owners, so the obvious impersonations are off the table on day one.
A floor on every bid, so bidding on everything costs real money.
A ceiling on every bid, so a large balance is not a strategy.
A limit on how many auctions one wallet can open in a day, so one person cannot occupy a day's worth of names and sit on them. Bidding in auctions somebody else opened is never limited.
A rising deposit for wallets that seal bids and never open them. Doing that fakes demand and pushes prices up; doing it repeatedly costs more each time, and the effect fades if you stop.
Names designed to be mistaken for ours are refused — namld for namid, for instance. Near-misses of ordinary names are allowed and simply shown to bidders, because deciding that mangos is a fake mango is not a judgement we should be making.

Two popular ideas we decided against, and why. Making every name permanently for sale at a price its owner names would end squatting and also end the point: a name anyone can take by naming a price is not an identity. Requiring proof of identity, one name per person, would need an identity provider, which is the thing this protocol exists so that you do not need.

5. Claiming the root that matches your domain

Say you run xchfi.com and you want .xchfi. Which of these applies to you depends on the name, and the claim page will tell you for any name you type. There is also a Claim tab inside the NamID app in the Sage wallet.

If the name is already reserved for you

This is the case for .xchfi, and for every one of the 10,000 well-known sites. The name is being held for whoever runs the matching domain, and it is not for sale to anyone else. You prove you control the domain using DNSSEC — a signed DNS record that we check all the way up to the internet's root keys, which means nobody can fake it by borrowing a DNS server for an hour. A verified proof makes the handover eligible for approval. It does not hand you a coin by itself and it does not skip the vote.

If the name matches a real DNS top-level domain

It is held for the organisation that operates the real one, and it cannot be won at auction by anybody. There is a date on the lock and the DAO can shorten or extend it.

If the name is simply open to auction

Then nobody is holding it for you, and owning the domain does not entitle you to the name. A .com costs about ten dollars; if a .com were a claim on a root, buying the domain the day before the auction would be the easiest way to take a name off somebody — the very thing this section is meant to prevent.

What proving your domain does get you:

a published link between your domain and the name, so bidders can see who the established holder is;
the right to start the auction now instead of waiting for the name's release date;
the tie-break, if you and somebody else end up at the same price.

You still bid, and you can still be outbid. We think that is the right answer: who already answers for a name is real information and worth publishing, but a domain is a contract with a registrar, not a deed.

6. Where the numbers live

Every figure on this page is a setting the DAO can change, not something welded into the protocol, and the auction page for any name shows that name's own figures — the ones its auction opened with, which are not necessarily today's. Where a limit is our policy rather than a rule of the chain, the page says so there too.

This describes the protocol as configured on 26 October 2026, on testnet11. Nothing on this page is an offer to sell a name, and the figures here will change before any live launch.