WHOIS (and RDAP)

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.