ICANN-Accredited Registrar
A registrar approved by ICANN under a Registrar Accreditation Agreement to sell gTLD domains.
- 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.
Related keywords
- accredited registrar
- RAA
- ICANN accreditation
- gTLD
- registrar agreement
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
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.