Pricing

All prices are immutable constants in the contract. There is no owner who could change them, and no fee switch. Everything you pay the protocol is burned, locked in the contract forever, with one exception: a referrer. A registration can point to a referrer, another ethername that then earns 20% of this name’s fees and premium for as long as the referrer stays active; the other 80% is burned. A registration with no referrer burns the full 100%, and so do its renewals and premium. The contract has no owner and no withdraw function, so nothing it keeps can ever leave. Like the EIP-1559 base fee, the burned ETH is removed from circulating supply forever.

Registration and renewal

Renewal costs exactly the same as registration and extends the expiry by 365 days from the current expiry date, so renewing early loses nothing.

Length is measured in bytes

The fee tiers use the UTF-8 byte length of the name, not the number of characters you see. ASCII letters, digits and symbols are 1 byte each, so for ordinary names, bytes and characters are the same thing. Accented characters are usually 2 bytes, CJK characters 3, and most emoji 4. A single-emoji name like 🔥 is therefore a 4-byte name costing 0.005 ETH per year, not a 1-character name costing 0.05 ETH.

Grace period

When a name expires, it enters a 90-day grace period. During grace:

• the name can still be renewed at the normal price;
• the name stops resolving and the token cannot be transferred;
• nobody can register it away from its owner.

Renewals are permissionless: anyone can pay to renew any name, whether it is in grace or not. Renewing a name you do not own is a gift, since it always extends the registration for the current owner. Useful for keeping a friend’s name (or your community’s names) alive.

The premium auction

If the grace period passes without renewal, the name becomes available again, but with a temporary premium added to the registration fee, so that valuable names are not sniped the second they drop:

• the premium starts at 100 ETH;
• it decays linearly to zero over 21 days;
• after 21 days the name costs the normal registration fee.

The premium applies only to registration after grace, never to renewal. It is burned like the registration fee, with the same one exception: if the registration points to a referrer, the referrer earns 20% of the premium too. No part of it reaches the previous owner. When you register a name in its premium window, the site quotes you the current premium; any overpayment is refunded by the contract automatically, and because the premium only ever decreases, a quoted price can never become insufficient while your transaction confirms.

Subnames

Creating subnames under a name you own is free (gas only), and subnames never expire on their own; they live as long as their parent chain of names stays registered. If you buy a subname through a subname sale, the price is whatever the seller configured; none of it goes to the protocol.