Pending Delete (Drop)
The final status before an unrenewed domain is released back to the public for registration.
- glossary
Pending delete is the last status in a lapsed domain's lifecycle: after the redemption period ends without recovery, the registry marks the name pendingDelete for about five days, during which it cannot be renewed or transferred. At the end of that window the domain drops — it is purged and released back to the public, available to register again first-come-first-served. This moment is what backorder and drop-catching services race to capture for desirable names.
Related keywords
- pending delete
- domain drop
- drop catching
- expired domain
- release
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.