Ownership

A name is owned by a person or by an organization. For a brand it should be the organization: an employee leaving must not take the namespace with them.

The term

Ownership is annual and renewable. Names do not become permanent abandoned inventory.

Stage	How long	What happens
Active	12 months	Resolves normally
Expiring	last 30 days	Resolves normally, you are warned
Grace	30 days after expiry	Stops resolving, you can still renew
Quarantine	30 days	Still yours to recover, nobody else can register it
Available	—	Back on the market

Ninety days from the first warning to release; sixty from expiry. Grace and quarantine both stop the name resolving and both keep it off the market — what separates them is whose clock it is. Grace is yours: renewing restores the name immediately. Quarantine is everyone else's, and it exists so a lapsed name is not caught the instant it falls, which is how a brand loses its name to someone watching for it over a forgotten invoice.

:::warning Nothing advances the stages yet Renewal works (below). The clock does not: no job moves a name from Active to Expiring or any further, and nothing notifies you. A name bought today keeps working past its expiry date.

Renewal shipped first on purpose. A clock that only takes names away, with no way to pay, is worse than no clock. :::

Renewing

GET  /v1/namespaces/*yourname/renewal    what it costs and how long is left
POST /v1/namespaces/*yourname/renewal    a Stripe Checkout link

Reading is separate from paying, so you can see the figure and the dates without starting a checkout you did not want.

Renewing early does not cost you the time you already paid for. A year is added to the term you hold, not to today. Renewing after expiry starts the year from today — the lapsed days are gone, but the name is not.

You can renew from grace and from quarantine. That is what those stages are for.

You cannot renew a suspended name. Suspension is an enforcement decision, and paying your way out of one would make it a fee instead.

Names are sold at most two years ahead. Without a ceiling, a name could be bought out of reach for a century in an afternoon.

If your name belongs to an organization, only its owners and admins can renew it. An editor can change what the name says and cannot spend the organization's money — publishing content and authorizing a charge are different kinds of trust.

History

Every ownership change is recorded permanently: registration, purchase, claim, transfer, suspension, quarantine, release, expiry, restoration and administrative intervention — each with who did it and why.

This is append-only. When ownership is disputed, how a name came to be held is the record that matters, and a system that quietly overwrites it has nothing to show.

Transfers

Names can change hands. A name that cannot move is a name a company cannot acquire along with the business it belongs to.

Transfers are handled by an administrator: both sides confirm, the transfer is recorded. A transferred name then cannot be transferred again for seven days, so a stolen account cannot pass a name through several hands before anyone notices.

:::warning Not yet built No endpoint and no workflow exist. :::

Verification

Unverified	the default
Person verified	a real individual
Business verified	a registered company
Brand verified	a trademark holder

A badge appears only for an approved verification. It is never inferred from a linked social account or a claimed domain — otherwise the badge would mean asserted rather than checked, and a badge that means asserted is worse than no badge.