Reserved Names (Blocked Names)
Domains a registry withholds from open registration, such as premium, policy, or protected labels.
- glossary
Reserved names are labels a registry holds back from open registration. The reasons vary: some are premium names set aside to sell at a higher price, some are blocked for policy or legal reasons (geographic terms, registrar names, ICANN-mandated strings), and some sit on a collision-avoidance list to prevent clashes with internal network names. The reserved list is specific to each TLD and set by its operator under ICANN rules, which is why a name can be available in one TLD but unregisterable in another. Reservation happens entirely at the registry layer of the traditional system, before a name ever becomes a registrant's — and so before it could be tokenized.
Related keywords
- reserved names
- blocked names
- registry reserved
- premium reserved
- collision list
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.