ICANN-Accredited Registrar (RAA)

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. On the Namefi platform, tokenized domains remain anchored to accredited-registrar infrastructure at the DNS layer, ensuring that on-chain ownership of a name is always backed by a valid registration in the authoritative registry. Source: ICANN Accredited Registrars list.