D3 Co-Founder on Tokenizing 371M Domains and Building DomainFi

Key Takeaways

D3’s Doma Protocol has processed over $120 million in volume and 16 million transactions since launching in December 2025.
The platform tokenizes domains while remaining compatible with ICANN and DNS infrastructure, targeting a market of 371 million active domains.
Doma has attracted more than 50,000 wallets and launched 600+ fractionalized domains as it pushes DomainFi adoption.

D3’s Doma Protocol has processed more than $120 million in trading volume across 16 million transactions since its December 2025 mainnet launch, as the DomainFi project pushes to bring tokenized trading to a domain market that has historically settled through private brokers over the course of weeks.

Michael Ho, co-founder and chief business officer at D3, told CCN the platform is built to extend programmable finance to the 371 million domains already in active use without breaking their underlying DNS infrastructure.

From Goldman M&A to a Broken Domain Market

Ho said the opportunity became clear once he applied the lens he had used on Wall Street to the domain industry.

“Domains appreciate, generate revenue, and trade hands for millions of dollars, but they have none of the market infrastructure that surrounds other asset classes of comparable size,” he said.

At Goldman, he added, “we spent enormous effort building liquidity and price discovery for markets, and the domain market had none of that.”

Premium trades ran through private broker networks with settlement taking weeks, and price discovery was “essentially non-existent outside a handful of auction platforms.” That gap, Ho said, was the opportunity: “the asset class was real, the market structure was two decades behind.”

Building DNS Compliance Into the Blockchain

Doma Protocol’s design treated compatibility with ICANN and DNS as “a hard constraint from day one,” according to Ho. Those frameworks support 371 million active domains and the routing infrastructure the internet depends on, and Ho said early Web3 naming projects that ignored them “struggled to gain real traction.”

Ho described the technical challenge as building a chain “where domains can be tokenized in place and traded onchain without breaking their DNS compatibility or their relationship with registrars,” which meant working within ICANN’s governance frameworks rather than around them.

“Some Web3 naming projects were built to bypass existing internet infrastructure entirely,” Ho said. “The better approach is to upgrade it, which is a much harder engineering problem than starting from scratch, but it’s the one worth solving.”

Trading Volume and the Robinhood Comparison

Ho has compared D3’s domain trading to tokenized equities on platforms such as Robinhood, and he said the parallel holds “at the functional level” because both remove the intermediary layer that kept most participants out of markets with real underlying value.

Premium domains “have always appreciated and traded for significant sums,” he said, but settlement historically ran through private brokers with cumbersome escrow that took weeks.

Doma Protocol replaces that with “onchain trading, real-time liquidity pools, and other DeFi mechanics that didn’t exist for this asset class before.” Ho said the platform has also recorded more than 50,000 unique wallets and over 600 fractional domain launches since mainnet. “That’s early, but the volume is real and so is the asset class behind it,” he said.

Buyers so far are “a mix of crypto-native traders and domain investors who’ve been waiting for a more efficient way to move positions,” Ho said. The larger opportunity, he added, is opening up the existing domain market, all 371 million domains in active use, “to capital that currently has no access.”

Institutional domain portfolios remain largely illiquid, which is what D3’s recently announced Domain Asset Vehicles are designed to address. “The buyer profile will broaden as liquidity deepens and price discovery matures,” Ho said.

Expansion Beyond a Single Chain

D3 has already integrated with Base and Solana, which Ho described as reflecting “where domain infrastructure is heading more broadly, into the platforms where the majority of onchain activity already happens.”

He said the opportunity is not limited to a single chain or ecosystem: “as liquidity deepens and price discovery matures, the asset class becomes relevant to any platform where domains function as financial instruments, identity anchors, or both.” Ho said the 371 million domains in active use represent the addressable universe, and the integrations so far are “early proof that the infrastructure to bridge domains across chains works.”

ENS Partnership Anchors the Identity Pitch

Ho has said the next evolution of the internet is “interoperable digital identities,” and he positioned DomainFi as distinct from other onchain naming projects that “build parallel systems and ask users to migrate to them.” That approach, he said, has produced adoption numbers that “reflected” the difficulty. DomainFi, by contrast, is “closer to RWA tokenization applied to the domain asset class that already underpins the internet.”

D3 has partnered with ENS to bridge DNS names with Web3 naming systems, so a domain tokenized on Doma “can resolve to an ENS name but also works in web browsers, email, and exists within ICANN’s framework.” Owners get programmable finance “without giving up any of the utility they already have,” Ho said, framing the value proposition as an upgrade to the infrastructure the internet already depends on.

AI Agents Could Become the Dominant Buyers

Ho said the timeline for AI identity overtaking human identity as the primary driver of domain demand “is compressing faster than most people expected even a year ago.” As agents transact, make payments, and interact across platforms, they need “persistent, verifiable identities,” and domains offer existing internet infrastructure that is “already trusted by the systems agents need to interact with, and programmable in ways static identifiers are not.”

His longer-term projection is that the number of AI agents operating online will “significantly exceed the number of human users,” creating a demand curve for identity infrastructure that “isn’t priced into the domain market today.”

Whether that shift takes three years or seven is hard to call precisely, Ho said, but “the direction is clear: domains are part of the agentic economy.”

Metrics for the Next Five Years

When asked what success looks like over a three- to five-year horizon, Ho said the goal is for “the majority of the internet’s domain infrastructure” to be “programmable, liquid, and agent-ready.”

He pointed to the $70 million sale of AI.com as evidence that the underlying market already supports large transactions, but said deals like that “run through private brokers and take months to settle,” a market structure D3 aims to change.

Ho said the metric that matters most is how much of the 371 million domain universe moves onchain as a liquid financial and identity asset, with institutional portfolios structured as Domain Asset Vehicles, liquidity depth, and developer participation as the signals to watch.

Success, in Ho’s perspective, comes down to “whether we’ve fundamentally changed the value of domains and what they can do.”