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ICANN-Accredited Registrar

A registrar approved by ICANN under a Registrar Accreditation Agreement to sell gTLD domains.

FBFenwei BianAuthorVZVictor ZhouEditorJune 22, 2026
  • glossary

An ICANN-accredited registrar is a company that has entered into a Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN, granting it the contractual right to register domains in generic top-level domains directly through the registry responsible for each TLD. Accreditation requires meeting financial, technical, and operational standards — including escrow of customer data, compliance with WHOIS obligations, and adherence to transfer and dispute policies — and registrars must renew accreditation periodically. Only accredited registrars can interact with registries via EPP as a first-party; companies without accreditation must resell through an accredited partner and are therefore called resellers. The distinction matters for domain owners: an accredited registrar bears direct contractual obligations to ICANN, offering a layer of consumer protection that pass-through resellers may not independently provide.

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Contributors

Fenwei Bian

Software Developer & Writer • Namefi
Author

Fenwei Bian is a software developer in her thirties who spends her working hours in pull requests and her weekends with her hands in soil or sawdust. Years of open source on GitHub taught her that names are interfaces: a good one is clear, honest about what it does, and kind to whoever has to use it next.

She gardens because it rewards patience and punishes wishful thinking, and she does woodwork because a joint either fits or it doesn't. Both habits show up in how she writes about naming — measure twice, check the source, and don't sand over a rough spot and hope no one notices.

For Namefi she writes about how domain markets actually move, the practical trade-offs of tokenizing and flipping names, and picking a domain you'll still be glad you own in twenty years.

GitHub

Victor Zhou

Founder & Standards Editor • Namefi
Editor

Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.

His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.

For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.

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