TheCryptoEye

How does Afternic Fast Transfer actually work? When I first started buying domains, the Fast Transfer process seemed a bit magical, like something that @GoDaddy must have conjured behind closed doors at an ICANN convention in Prague circa 1998. In reality, GoDaddy only purchased @Afternic a decade ago in 2013, and the Afternic DLS Network was already well established and not at all supernatural. It turns out that Fast Transfer uses the same mechanism as every other domain transfer – EPP Auth Codes, sprinkled with a bit of pre-approval (opt-in) to grease the ICANN transfer wheels. Afternic DLS and Sedo MLS are simply a collection of APIs that facilitate the exchange of auth codes from "losing" registrar to "gaining" registrar. The pre-approval legal bit (opt-in) allows the registrar to initiate and consummate domain transfers on your behalf, required as per @ICANN rules. In order to participate in the Fast Transfer network, registrars must implement a relatively complex 12-step workflow, as seen here in the Afternic integration docs: It starts by putting a hold and transfer lock on the domain, which by default expires after 5 days. Once the gaining registrar confirms payment, the domain is unlocked and the usual EPP transfer dance can begin. The transfer is auto-approved by the losing registrar and the dance is complete. One interesting note is that Afternic generates their own unique auth code and then passes it to the registrars to use. I'm guessing this is a security measure to ensure transfers always use a fresh auth code - does anybody know the official reasoning? Why does Afternic Fast Transfer only support 10 TLDs? Last year, Afternic announced Fast Transfer support for .IO and @xyz, bringing the total to 10 TLDs. We've already established that Fast Transfer is effectively just passing around auth codes, and shouldn't require any special registry support. In fact, @Sedo's version of Fast Transfer already supports over 600+ TLDs. It seems like Afternic would be incentivized to integrate more TLDs, so why haven't they? I can only speculate: - The core Afternic system is 20+ years old. Maybe adding additional TLDs requires a lot of manual changes to many parts of the code. Maybe the devs say it needs a big rewrite that will take years, so management compromised and went for the two most popular TLDs instead. - The vast majority of transaction volume most likely comes from the 10 TLDs they already have. Would the availability of Fast Transfer for other TLDs substantially increase their sales? Probably not. - The new guys from the Netherlands said they already built Afternic 3.0 on the IBM Blockchain® but they're all on sabbatical and can't be reached.