Before you stake, consider

1. Not all registrars will list all TLDs - some will list all, others will only list those TLDs that they consider a commercial opportunity. Like all "search" facilities, being in the top few makes a sale far more likely, this is related to how many sales you get & how commercial they think your TLD is.


2. The TLD owners who do the most to promote their TLD are the ones that sell the most. Nothing "sells itself" and even Apple spend a fortune every year on advertising. Promoting your TLD will help with getting registrars to list your domain or raise its ranking in their search tools.


3. We are most interested in working with TLD owners who are committed to working to build a long term business & are seeking a partner who will help then do this.


In our business plan, we intend to start an opt-in marketing service for Owners. We will employ one or more full time sale/marketing people who will promote TLDs and help owners with their business promotion & social media strategy. This will happen as the numbers get to the point we can fund it enough to get it off the ground.


Introduction

The Gateway Registry is primarily run by me, James Stevens - if you want a chat, I'm in the Handshake Community Discord. 
I was the CTO of the dot-IO domain registry for a little over 10 years, until it was sold to Afilias in 2017. However, I personally wrote & owned the registry software system we used, so this is the exact same software system that we use at the Gateway Registry.


At dot-IO we processed a lot of transactions and worked with all the big name registrars (NameCheap, GoDaddy etc), so we are confident the software is compatible with the industry standards and can scale to significant transaction volumes.


It is common that a TLD registry does not sell second level domains (SLDs) directly, so we also have a dedicated "registrar" (yes, very confusing naming) that we use to sell names through gateway.io as well as a number of third party registrars, like Porkbun.


All the TLDs on our registry platform will be signed with DNSSEC using KSK+ZSK & ECDSA256. DNSSEC is a requirement for you to be able to use DANE, a decentralised HTTPS standard.


While your TLD is with us, you will still be able to use it - you will just need to raise a ticket in the Owner's web UI to ask us to makes the changes you require.



FAQ

- What's your initial fee for every TLD?

We do not charge owner's anything to stake their TLDs with us. However, we may advise you or require you to get a trademark assessment done on your TLD so we can both avoid getting shut-down and having an the SLD owners rugged. 


- How much is the percentage of commission for every SLD rented annually?

We charge 30% of each transaction (new, renew & transfer), but we do not charge extra for transactions like transfers or for recovering domains that have expired, so long as they are still within the SLD owner's grace period of 60 days.


The remaining 70% is your royalty on the sale and will be paid into an account we will run on our system for you. You will be given a login to an Owner's Web UI where you can see the current status of your account updated live. You can also opt to receive monthly statements by email.


For TLDs with over 5,000 live registrations or a base price of $50 or above the rate will drop to 25%

For TLDs with over 10,000 live registrations or a base price of $100 or above the rate will drop to 20%

If you have a pricing model you think needs special consideration, just DM me - "James Stevens#2455" on discord is best.


- Can I choose some "premium domains" for my TLDs with higher prices?

Yes. In the Owner's UI you can name individual premium names or set "wildcards" such as "all one or two letter names".


To try & make pricing easier for prospective customers & resellers, we set premium pricing in "bands" or "categories". You then set the price on the category, and decide which names will go into which category. Currently we have five categories - Standard, Silver, Gold, Platinum & Palladium. You will need us to set up the categories themselves, but you can set the prices for each category & which names go into which category.


It is quite important that you set up all the pricing before you open the TLD for sales


-Can I choose some SLDs as "reserved" for my own use?

All live  (active in the DNS) SLDs must be paid for. This is becuase there is a cost to us in maintaining them and making sure they are live, secure & working 24x7x365.


You can reserve names, for example to auction, or gift, later but they are not live so can not be used until they are converted to being a live name. The only name you can use for free is the TLD itself.


In the Owner's UI, you can use any credit in your royalty account to buy SLDs to use yourself or gift. You can also use your royalties to pay for a reserved name to be converted into a live name. Although you will appear to pay the normal wholesale price, you will also receive the full royalty on your own purchases in the normal way. So effectively the cost to you is just the 30% registry fees.


To convert a reserved name to a live name you buy a renewal on it. You can then gift it as a live name. If you gift it as a reserved name it will still convert to a live name, but with the current day as its expiry date, and the new owner will get 60 days grace to apply to renew it.


-What's are the registrars business where the SLDs of my TLDs could be for sale?

We have a number of registrar partners, like Porkbun, we're often signing up new ones, so trying to maintain a full & correct list here would be tricky. In addition we run our own registrar service at gateway.io


You can establish a registrar service if you wish. We are not currently aware of an open source registrar system, but there's definitely a demand, if anybody wants to take up that challenge.


A registrar account would be run separately from your owners account, but we can easily transfer money between the two, if you just raise a ticket in the Owner's UI. For owner's or registrar tickets, especially for financial issues, it's better if you raise a ticket in the registry ticket system as this requires you login first, so we'd know it was really you.


One security requirement we have for registrars is that they use the EPP services from a fixed IP Address (or set of fixed addresses), but we do support IPv4 or IPv6. Your EPP login will be tied to your IP Addresses to help prevent your account getting stolen.