WHOIS (and RDAP)
WHOIS and its successor RDAP are the public lookup services for a domain's registration details, such as its registrar and expiration date.
- glossary
WHOIS is the long-standing protocol and public service for looking up registration information about a domain — registrar, registration and expiration dates, and historically the registrant's contact information. Its modern successor is RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol), which returns structured JSON and is the protocol ICANN and registries are migrating to. For tokenized domains, WHOIS/RDAP records still exist at the registrar level because the underlying DNS registration is real and ICANN-recognized — only the ownership and transfer mechanics shift to the on-chain layer. Privacy is increasingly common: many registrars now mask personal contact details by default, in line with privacy laws like GDPR. Reference: ICANN's WHOIS lookup.
Related keywords
- RDAP
- domain registration lookup
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- domain ownership lookup
- WHOIS
- what is WHOIS
- WHOIS meaning
- WHOIS definition
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.