Registered Agents Inc announces six applications and a registry backend

Registered Agents Inc said on 1 September 2026 that it has applied for six strings in ICANN’s 2026 round: .epic, .identity, .mark, .private, .registeredagent and .verified. The announcement came in the company’s own press release, which names all six.

The release states the applications are filed. It does not say which of the six are primary strings and which are replacements, and that distinction is the one that decides whether an overlap with another applicant is a real contention set.

Three of the six are already in the tracker

.epic and .mark appear in Link Freedom Group’s published namespace. .private appears there too, and in the eight strings Endpoint Domains has disclosed.

Each of those three now carries one more public claimant than it did yesterday. None of them is confirmed contention. A replacement string is only reachable if the primary fails, so two applicants naming the same string are in a contention set only when both filed it as primary, and Link Freedom Group has not said which of its strings are which. Endpoint Domains has said its eight are primary; Registered Agents Inc has not said either way about .private.

The remaining three, .identity, .registeredagent and .verified, are new to this tracker, with no other public claimant found in the sources reviewed.

The registry backend, and where it stands with ICANN

The same release announced Astronym Registry, a backend platform the company says it built from scratch and intends to offer to other operators. “We’re not building Astronym to only run six domains,” the release quotes Christopher Ambler, its Director of Domain Registry, as saying. “We’re building the infrastructure for a much bigger registry business.”

The company is precise about the regulatory position, and the precision is worth repeating rather than paraphrasing. Its services page says Registered Agents Inc “has applied to ICANN to be evaluated as a Main Registry Service Provider”, that registry services are “not yet available for customer selection”, and that the company “is not currently an ICANN-evaluated or listed RSP”. ICANN’s published list of evaluated Main, DNS, DNSSEC, Proxy and IDN support-level applications does not name the company or Astronym.

An applicant may name an RSP that has not completed evaluation; what an applicant may not do is rely on one that fails it.

The registrar

Epik’s own site states that the registrar “is now in the hands of Registered Agents Inc”. The company has applied for .epic.

What remains unconfirmed

Only ICANN’s official publication can establish the full applicant list for any of these six strings, and the primary-or-replacement status of every application in the round. Until then the .epic, .mark and .private pages record an overlap of public claims, not a contention set.