I’ll start with the moment it hit me.
I was reading a thread on X about Freename. Some operator had just sold a premium TLD for an absurd amount of money. The kind of money that makes you put your coffee down.
I sat with that for about ten seconds. Then I asked the question that would change everything for me:
Wait. You can OWN a TLD?
Not register a domain. Own the entire extension. The thing on the right side of the dot. The piece of digital real estate that every other domain on that namespace sits on top of, paying you royalties forever.
That’s the moment everything clicked.
How I’d been thinking about domains
For most of my professional life, my relationship with domains was the same as everyone else’s. I’d go to a registrar, search for something I wanted, get told it was either taken (most of the time) or available for $12.99/year (rare). I’d buy it, set up a renewal, and forget about it until the email screamed at me a year later.
I owned exactly zero of those domains. I rented them. From a registrar. Who could, in theory, pull them at any moment for any number of reasons — TOS violation, payment issue, legal request, registry policy change, whatever. The whole thing was a lease, dressed up as ownership.
And here’s the wild part: I never questioned it. Nobody does. That’s just how the internet works.
Until I found Freename.
The Freename rabbit hole
I spent days reading everything I could find about Freename. Their docs, their X account, their Discord, every Medium post that mentioned them, every YouTube video where someone pretended to know what they were talking about.
The basics, in case you’re new:
- Freename lets you mint TLDs onchain —
.surf,.esports,.foundation, whatever string you can imagine - You own them like real estate — they’re NFTs, transferable, transparently recorded
- You earn royalties when people register second-level domains under your TLD
- No renewals, no registrars, no expiry — once you mint it, it’s yours
It sounds simple when you write it like that. But the implications are massive.
Imagine if, in 1995, someone had told you: “Hey, instead of renting .com from VeriSign forever, you can just OWN .shop outright, and every domain registered on it pays you a percentage.”
You’d have laughed. Then you’d have bought every TLD you could afford. Then you’d be VeriSign.
That’s the energy of Freename right now. Early 90s, but for namespaces.
I didn’t have a thesis. I had a feeling.
I want to be honest about how I made the decision. I didn’t run spreadsheets. I didn’t model out royalty curves and category-killer dynamics and time-to-liquidity scenarios. That came later.
What I had was a feeling. The same feeling you get when you’re paddling out and you see a set on the horizon — the one nobody else has noticed yet — and you know exactly which one you’re going to take. You don’t analyze it. You just paddle.
So I paddled. I bought my first TLD shortly after going down that rabbit hole.
I’m not going to talk numbers or specifics — that’s not the point. The point is the shift. I went from being a tenant to being a landlord, in one transaction, on a piece of internet infrastructure that hadn’t existed two years earlier.
What changed after that
Once you make the shift, you can’t go back. You start seeing the world differently.
Every brand name on TV becomes a potential TLD. Every category gets evaluated for namespace fit. Every news article about a city, a movement, a cultural moment becomes a search query: “Is this string available on Freename?”
You stop seeing words and start seeing categories. Categories that need permanent infrastructure, that can’t be served by .com because .com is too crowded and too generic and too rented.
“In a free society, the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”
— Walter E. Williams
I think about that quote a lot. Replace “state” with “registrar” and “free society” with “onchain namespace” and you’ve got the whole thesis of why TLDs onchain matter. The infrastructure should serve the user. Not the other way around.
The projects that came after
That first TLD purchase opened a door. I walked through it. Today, here’s where I am:
dotesports.gg — I bought .esports because the competitive gaming scene needed its own namespace. Every team, every player, every coach, every tournament — they all deserve identity that doesn’t depend on Twitter handles or Twitch URLs that can disappear tomorrow.
queensland.foundation — I bought six namespaces (.queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, .brisbane2032) because Queensland deserves a permanent digital home that isn’t .com.au. From $5, for life. That’s a project I could work on for the next 20 years and still feel like I’m just getting started.
Two projects. One thesis. Permanent identity, onchain.
What I’d tell you if you’re at that moment
Maybe you’re reading this because you just stumbled onto Freename. Maybe a friend mentioned it, or you saw a thread, or you watched some YouTuber explain it badly. You’re at the same moment I was at, with the same question I had: “Wait, can you OWN a TLD?”
Here’s what I’d tell my past self:
1. Don’t overthink it. The window where this is cheap won’t be open forever. Every category-defining TLD that’s still available right now will be claimed within 18-24 months. The people who are paddling are the ones who’ll have the names that matter.
2. Don’t buy randomly. Have a thesis for every TLD you mint. “I’m buying .X because I believe .X will be valuable to community Y for reason Z.” If you can’t write that sentence in under thirty seconds, don’t buy it.
3. Build something on top of what you mint. Just owning a TLD isn’t enough. You need to operate it — give it identity, give it utility, give it a story. Operators win. Speculators get bored.
4. The category matters more than the string. A boring word in a hot category beats a clever word in a dead category, every single time.
5. Talk to other operators. This space is small enough that you can DM almost anyone serious. Most of them will reply. The ones who won’t are usually too busy operating, which is the right kind of person to want to talk to anyway.
The mental shift, in detail
Let me dig deeper into what changes in your head when you go from renter to owner. Because this is the part nobody talks about, and it’s the most important.
When you rent a domain from a registrar, your relationship with that domain is transactional and time-bound. You pay $12, you get a year. You forget about it, you lose it. Even if you set up auto-renewal, you’re still in a permanent state of “this thing could go away if I stop paying.” That mental load is real, even if it’s small.
When you own a TLD, the relationship is structural and permanent. You can’t lose it by forgetting. You can’t lose it by being late on a payment. You can’t lose it because someone at a corporate registrar decided to change their TOS. It’s yours like a house deed is yours.
This shift sounds small but it changes everything about how you think about the asset:
- You start investing in it (building tools, designing brand systems, writing copy) because you know your investment isn’t going to evaporate
- You start operating it (running it as a business, treating registrants as customers, building infrastructure around it)
- You start planning for it (5-year roadmaps, long-term partnerships, multi-year content strategies)
Renters don’t do any of those things. Renters just renew.
The lessons I learned the hard way
Without going into specifics, here are the lessons I picked up along the way that I’d want any new operator to skip:
Lesson 1: Buying TLDs without a thesis is dangerous. Excitement clouds judgment. Excitement is dangerous. If you can’t articulate in one sentence why a specific TLD will be valuable to a specific audience over the next 5-10 years, you don’t have a thesis — you have a feeling, and feelings are not enough to justify locking up capital.
Lesson 2: Operating a TLD is a real job. I thought owning a TLD was passive. “Mint it, register names, collect royalties.” The reality is that operating a TLD properly requires a website, documentation, brand protection, customer service, abuse handling, trademark dispute management, resolver infrastructure maintenance. It’s not passive income. It’s a small business. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t operated one yet.
Lesson 3: Be an operator, not a registrar. Early on, the temptation is to maximize registrations at any cost. Friction-free flows, low prices, no curation. The result is a lot of low-quality registrations from people who aren’t actually invested in the namespace. Curate. Better to have 100 thoughtful claimers than 10,000 throwaway ones. The operators who treat this like real estate get long-term loyalty. The ones who treat it like a domain registrar end up on a hamster wheel.
Lesson 4: Network with other operators. The Freename operator community is small, smart, and surprisingly generous with knowledge. Reach out. Ask questions. Share comps. You can’t shortcut the lessons others have already learned by trying to learn them yourself.
Lesson 5: Patience is the entire job. Meaningful adoption takes 5-10 years for any TLD that’s not in the absolute hottest narrative cycle. You’re planting trees, remember. Trees don’t grow on quarterly earnings cycles.
The broader thesis
The reason this matters beyond just my personal story is that the entire internet is currently running on rented infrastructure. We rent domains. We rent storage. We rent compute. We rent identity (every Twitter handle, every Instagram name, every TikTok username — all rented).
The next 20 years are going to be about flipping that. Permanent, owned, portable infrastructure replacing rented infrastructure across every layer. Domains were the first thing rented (1985). Domains are going to be the first thing un-rented (2024-2030).
If you understand this thesis, you understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Every TLD I mint is one less piece of rented infrastructure in the world. Every claim someone makes under my TLDs is one more permanent identity. Compound that for 30 years and you start seeing why this matters.
Where I’m at now
A few years in, I have multiple live TLD projects, a portfolio I’m not posting publicly, and a personal commitment to keep showing up — every day.
I work mostly alone. I ship at my own pace. I don’t hire, don’t pitch, don’t VC. I just operate. The discipline is the moat. Everyone else is busy raising rounds, hiring teams, building demos. I’m busy answering claim inquiries, updating documentation, talking to operators in the same niche, shipping incremental improvements that nobody notices individually but that add up to something real over years.
This site, kooky.surf, is where I’ll be writing about all of it. The builds, the lessons, the deals (when I can talk about them), the weird ideas, and yeah — probably more origin stories like this one.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. If you’re at your own “wait, can you OWN a TLD?” moment, paddle.
The set is right there.