On October 3, the British government announced that it would give up its sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago (British Indian Ocean Territory), an archipelago in the central Indian Ocean, and transfer it to Mauritius, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
Although this may seem like a mere political event on the surface, it is worth noting that this territorial handover may be accompanied by the disappearance of the popular top-level domain (TLD) ".io" in the technology and gaming industries.
The .io domain name stands for the Chagos Archipelago
The ".io" domain name has long been popular in the technology and gaming industries because it is interpreted as an abbreviation for "input/output". More importantly, ".io" is also a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), which is allocated and managed by the Internet Numbers Authority (IANA), and the country (or region) behind it is the Chagos Archipelago.
Why is it said that after the sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago is handed over from the UK to Mauritius, the ".io" domain name may disappear? The reason is that once the sovereignty transfer is completed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will no longer exist, and various international organizations will update their records accordingly. In particular, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will remove "IO" from its recorded country codes. IANA will also reject any new ".io" domain name registrations according to its specifications and begin to revoke existing related domain names. In layman's terms, the ".io" domain name and all related websites may disappear.
However, it is worth mentioning that IANA may also make an exception and allow ".io" to continue to exist, because under the ".io" domain name, there are a large number of technology and gaming companies, and the large amount of capital behind them may force IANA to make concessions.
More than 17% of cryptocurrency companies are using .io domains
In addition, according to data from the Web3 asset data platform RootData, the ".io" domain name is also favored by cryptocurrency companies. Among the 15,032 projects currently in operation included in RootData, 2,675 companies are using this domain name, accounting for as high as 17.8%. These companies include: Sui, Sei, Arbitrum, Filecoin, Blur, Optimism, IOTA, 1inch, Hamster Kombat, AltLayer, Blast, Banana Gun and other well-known projects and well-known institutions such as Ton Ventures and OpenSea Ventures.
