There is a version of this project where we tried to secure everything. Every suburb, every region, every coastal town and inland city and iconic landmark that might one day carry a permanent onchain address. That version exists somewhere in our early planning documents, in spreadsheets with too many rows and colour-coded columns that nobody could agree on. We looked at it, we discussed it seriously, and then we deliberately walked away from most of it.

What we actually secured — .queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, and .brisbane2032 — represents a fraction of what we considered. This post is about the rest. About the names we put on the table, argued over, researched carefully, and ultimately decided not to pursue. Because understanding what we didn’t build is, we think, just as important as understanding what we did.

This is not a post about regret. It’s a post about discipline.

Why the question of “what not to secure” matters

When you’re building something permanent, the cost of a wrong decision compounds forever. That’s not a figure of speech — it’s the literal nature of what we’re dealing with. Traditional domain registrars operate under a model where mistakes are recoverable. You let a domain expire, you redirect it, you rebrand. The annual renewal cycle, for all its frustrations, provides a natural correction mechanism. Every year is another chance to reassess.

Onchain TLDs don’t work that way. Once you’ve established a namespace — once people have built addresses under it, attached identity to it, embedded it in their digital lives — that namespace becomes part of the permanent record. The addresses issued under it don’t expire. The names don’t disappear. If you’ve built the wrong thing, you’ve built the wrong thing permanently.

That reality forced us to think very differently about scope. In a traditional domain business, the incentive is to grab as much as possible and sort it out later. In our model, the incentive is to get it right the first time — because there’s no “later” that fixes an early mistake. Every TLD we secured had to clear a high bar. And the bar wasn’t just “does this name make sense?” The bar was: “Does this name still make sense in twenty years? In forty? Does it mean something real to real people, or are we projecting a meaning onto it?”

Most of the names we considered didn’t clear that bar. Here’s how we thought about it.

The criteria we actually used

We didn’t start with a formal framework. These things never do start that way. We started with a list and a lot of conversation, and the criteria emerged from the arguments we kept having about specific names. After a while, we noticed that the same questions kept coming up. So we wrote them down.

Does the name carry genuine identity — not just geography?

There’s a difference between a place that exists and a place that people identify with. Queensland is a place people identify with deeply. Being a Queenslander is a cultural and emotional statement, not just an administrative one. Brisbane carries the same weight — it’s not merely the capital city; it’s a lifestyle, a community, a reference point that people carry with them when they leave. Surfers Paradise is globally understood as a single vivid idea: sun, surf, neon, the beach strip, a particular kind of Australian coastal life.

But plenty of places in Queensland exist without that kind of load-bearing identity. There are suburbs, towns, and regions that are simply coordinates — places where people happen to live, not places that form the nucleus of a person’s sense of self. We tried hard to distinguish between the two, because a TLD only makes sense when the people it’s meant to serve would actually want to carry that name as a permanent identifier.

Would someone pay once and keep it forever?

This is a more useful test than it sounds. We’d ask ourselves: if someone owns name.cairns or name.sunshinecoast or name.townsville, do they feel a permanent, unshakeable sense of ownership over that identifier? Is it something they’d build on, link to, reference in their professional and personal lives for decades? Or is it more like a novelty — interesting for a moment, but not something that grounds a lasting identity?

The permanent-ownership model demands that the underlying name has permanent resonance. If the identity is fragile or contingent, the permanence becomes a liability rather than a feature.

Is the name administratively stable?

Place names change. Boundaries shift. Local government amalgamations happen. Suburbs get absorbed, renamed, rezoned. A TLD that maps directly to a local government area, for example, is vulnerable in a way that a culturally embedded place name is not. We didn’t want to secure names that were essentially administrative constructs — names that could become technically incorrect or politically contested over time.

Does the name create confusion or overlap?

Some names we considered were strong on their own, but would create confusion alongside names we’d already decided to secure. The relationship between names in a namespace matters. We didn’t want a portfolio of TLDs that competed with each other or diluted each other’s meaning. Every addition to the set had to strengthen the whole, not fragment it.

Does the name belong to an audience, or is it just a name?

This is perhaps the hardest criterion to articulate, but it’s the one we came back to most often. Some place names feel like they belong to everyone who lives there. Some feel like they only belong to a particular business sector, or a particular tourism brand, or a particular era. We wanted TLDs that genuinely belonged to communities of people — not names that would end up being primarily useful to real estate developers or resort operators and essentially inaccessible to ordinary residents.

The names we seriously considered

Cairns

Cairns was probably the name that came closest to making the final list. It has real identity weight. It’s internationally known. It serves as the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area — two of the most recognisable natural features in the world. When people from Far North Queensland talk about home, they often talk about Cairns the way south-east Queenslanders talk about Brisbane: as the centre of things, the city that anchors a whole regional identity.

We went back and forth on Cairns for a long time.

What eventually gave us pause was the question of audience concentration. Cairns is a global tourist destination, but its permanent population is relatively contained. The people who would most want a permanent Cairns address — residents, long-term community members, local businesses — are a smaller and more geographically specific group than the audiences we could serve with the names we ultimately secured. Brisbane and the Gold Coast pull from vastly larger communities. The question wasn’t whether Cairns deserved a TLD, but whether this was the right time, and whether we were the right stewards to launch it.

We also thought carefully about the relationship between Cairns and Far North Queensland more broadly. There are communities in that region with deep ties to the land and a complex relationship with both commercial development and digital identity systems. We didn’t want to rush into a namespace that carries those complications without thinking them through properly. Cairns might be a future conversation. It isn’t the first one.

Sunshine Coast

The Sunshine Coast presents a fascinating case. As a region, it has massive and growing identity weight. The population has expanded dramatically. The lifestyle draw is real and powerful. The name itself is evocative — it communicates warmth, coast, a certain kind of ease.

But “Sunshine Coast” as a TLD creates a problem we couldn’t easily resolve: the name is composed of two common English words. “Sunshine” and “coast” individually carry enormous generic weight. The combination is specific enough in the Australian context, but we had concerns about how the TLD would be understood in a global onchain environment — and about the length of the name itself as a TLD.

TLD legibility matters more than people expect. When you see .queensland or .brisbane appended to an address, the parsing is instantaneous. You know what it is, where it belongs, what community it signals. .sunshinecoast is longer, somewhat hyphenatable in the mind, and risks being read as a generic descriptor rather than a proper place name. Compare it to .surfersparadise — which is also a multi-word name — and you can see the difference. Surfers Paradise functions as a single, fused concept. The words don’t exist independently in the way “sunshine” and “coast” do.

We also noticed that the Sunshine Coast doesn’t have a single cultural anchor in the way the Gold Coast does. The Gold Coast has a clearly defined identity — it’s a specific flavour of Queensland beach culture, instantly understood anywhere in the world. The Sunshine Coast is more diffuse, more residential, more diverse in what it means to the people who live there. That diversity is a genuine strength as a place to live. As a TLD, it made us uncertain.

Townsville

Townsville carries its identity hard. It is the north’s city, the largest population centre above Brisbane on the east coast, and it anchors a vast sweep of North Queensland geography and culture. People from Townsville are fiercely proud of where they’re from. The name itself is strong — direct, distinct, not easily confused with anything else.

We considered Townsville seriously because of that pride. The identity attachment is real. But when we worked through the criteria, we kept returning to one concern: scale. Not in a dismissive sense — scale matters in a specific way for this kind of infrastructure. A TLD needs enough of a community around it that the namespace develops meaning through use. It needs to grow into itself. The larger and more distributed the potential audience, the more likely that a namespace develops genuine depth rather than sitting as a sparse collection of registrations.

Townsville’s community is real and committed, but it is ultimately more constrained than Brisbane’s, the Gold Coast’s, or even Queensland’s as a whole. And in a model where addresses are permanent — where you are essentially building a permanent naming layer for a community — we wanted our first deployments to be in namespaces with the greatest possible density of genuine identity. Townsville might sit well in a future expansion, but it didn’t belong in the founding set.

Rockhampton

Rockhampton posed a different kind of difficulty. It has a strong, specific identity — the beef capital of Australia is a real and meaningful title, not just a marketing slogan. The region’s cultural character is distinct: conservative, hardworking, deeply tied to the land. “Rocky” is what people who love it call it. That shorthand tells you something about the affection people have for it.

But “Rockhampton” is a formal name that doesn’t quite match the vernacular. The TLD you’d want — if you were building for Rockhampton identity — might well be .rocky. Which is not a name we could secure, because “rocky” is a generic English word with no geographic specificity. And .rockhampton carries the full formal weight of a place name that, in practice, people abbreviate almost as soon as they say it.

This exposed a broader issue. There are places in Queensland whose strongest identity expressions live in nicknames, abbreviations, or informal forms — none of which translate cleanly into TLDs that carry geographic meaning without explanation. We didn’t want to secure names that required explanation. The names we secured require none.

The Whitsundays

The Whitsundays is a name with extraordinary global recognition. Say it anywhere in the world to anyone with even a passing interest in travel and you’ll get an immediate reaction. The islands, the sailing, the white silica beaches, Heart Reef — these are images that have circulated globally for decades.

We were genuinely excited about the Whitsundays for a period. The name is poetic. The identity is powerful. The brand is established.

The problem is that “the Whitsundays” as a name is explicitly pluralised and prefixed. No one says “I’m from Whitsunday” or “I live in Whitsunday.” The name always comes with “the” — it’s “the Whitsundays.” As a TLD, stripping “the” creates a name that doesn’t feel natural to the people it belongs to. Adding “the” creates a TLD — .thewhitsundays — that’s awkward to type, long, and structurally unusual for a namespace.

We also had the question of permanent residency versus tourist identity. A TLD is most useful when it belongs to people who live in or operate from that place — people who want to carry that identity as a permanent part of their digital presence. The Whitsundays has a significant permanent community, but a very large proportion of the name’s global recognition is driven by tourism. There’s nothing wrong with tourist identity, but it’s a different kind of identity than the community-rooted permanence we were designing for. A person who visited the Whitsundays once and loved it is not the audience for a permanent onchain address.

Toowoomba

Toowoomba has genuine claims on a TLD. It’s the largest inland city in Australia after Canberra, it’s the de facto capital of the Darling Downs, and it has a distinct cultural identity that residents feel strongly about. It’s also high enough above the coast to have its own climate, its own pace, its own character — it doesn’t feel like a suburb of Brisbane, even though Brisbane isn’t terribly far away.

The challenge with Toowoomba is that its identity, while real, is more local than it is broadly resonant. People in Toowoomba know exactly what it means to be from Toowoomba. People elsewhere in Queensland have a decent sense of it. But the name doesn’t carry the same global legibility as Brisbane, the Gold Coast, or even Cairns. If the goal of a TLD is partly to give people an identity that means something wherever they are in the world, Toowoomba is less useful than it might be. The identity is deep but narrow.

We also had a subtle concern about the relationship between Toowoomba and the Gold Coast as names. One of the things that makes .gold-coast work as a TLD is that it operates in a global register — it means something to people who have never set foot in Queensland. Toowoomba is beloved, but it requires context. Requiring context is not disqualifying on its own, but it becomes more significant when you’re making decisions about which names to prioritise in a limited founding set.

Ipswich

Ipswich is Queensland’s oldest city, and that history is woven into its identity. Its people are proud of it. The recent growth of the region — the expansion westward from Brisbane, the new communities, the changing demographics — gives it a certain energy.

But Ipswich has a complication that no amount of local pride resolves: there is already an Ipswich. A famous one, in England. It’s one of the oldest towns in Britain. For anyone in the global onchain ecosystem encountering .ipswich, the first mental association may not be Queensland at all. That’s not a deal-breaker in isolation — place names are shared all the time — but for a permanent namespace, you want as little interpretive friction as possible. You want the name to arrive with a clear meaning, not arrive with a question mark.

We also felt that Ipswich’s strongest identity is currently in flux. Cities that are growing and changing rapidly are interesting and vital, but their identity is still being defined. We preferred names that had settled into themselves — names where the cultural character was clear and had demonstrated permanence over time.

Bundaberg

Rum. Sugar cane. The birthplace of Bert Hinkler. Bundaberg has a specific identity, and people from there will tell you about it within minutes of meeting you. The name has genuine distinctiveness — there is nowhere else called Bundaberg, and the name carries a real, if niche, global familiarity mostly through its association with Bundaberg Rum.

The rum association is actually a small concern, not a large one. But it points to a broader issue: when a place name is strongly associated with a single product or a single brand, the TLD inherits that association whether it wants to or not. A .bundaberg address might serve a rum producer perfectly. It might feel slightly awkward for a community health organisation, a school, or a local government service. Namespaces with strong brand associations can develop a ceiling on their versatility.

Bundaberg also sits at a scale and global recognition level below what we felt was right for the founding set. It’s a strong regional city with a proud community. But the audience who would benefit from a permanent Bundaberg address is more limited than the audiences for the names we secured, and we were working with a limited number of decisions.

Mackay

Mackay is a city that punches above its weight in terms of Queensland’s economic output. It’s one of the world’s largest coal and sugar export hubs, and the people who live there have a strong, sometimes fierce sense of local identity. There’s something about Mackay — its working character, its proximity to the Whitsundays, its history as a sugar town that evolved into a mining services hub — that creates a genuine culture.

We looked at Mackay and found it compelling on identity grounds. What we found less compelling was the sheer geographic and cultural distance between Mackay and the broader Queensland audience we were initially trying to serve. Our founding TLDs are concentrated in South East Queensland for a reason: that’s where the population density is, where the digital infrastructure is most developed, where the critical mass of early adopters is most likely to live.

Mackay will always be significant to the people who are from Mackay. That matters enormously. But in a founding set, we needed to build the strongest possible foundation for the whole ecosystem — and that meant concentrating on names that would generate the most immediate and sustained engagement, names that more Queenslanders across the state would feel a connection to.

The names we dismissed more quickly

Not every name required extended debate. Some we dismissed relatively quickly, and it’s worth being honest about why.

Generic regional descriptors — names like .northqueensland or .farnoqld or .outback — were off the table almost immediately. These are administrative or descriptive constructs, not community identities. Nobody wakes up and thinks “I’m a Far North Queenslander” with the same directness that someone thinks “I’m from Cairns” or “I’m from Brisbane.” Generic regional names also lack the permanence criterion — they describe a zone, not a community, and zones shift.

Single suburbs — even major, well-known ones — were generally dismissed. Paddington, New Farm, Fortitude Valley, West End — these are real communities with real identity, but they’re communities within Brisbane. A person from New Farm is from New Farm and from Brisbane. The sub-metropolitan identity doesn’t have enough independent weight to stand alone as a TLD without the parent city. And the parent city — .brisbane — already exists in our portfolio.

Tourism brands that aren’t place names — things like .tropicalnorth or .reefcoast or .sunshinestate — were never really on the table. These are marketing constructs, not places. They describe experiences or destinations in ways that tourism boards have found useful, but they don’t correspond to communities that a person would identify as home. Nobody has “reefcoast” as a fundamental part of their identity. Nobody puts it on their business card and feels it says something true about who they are.

Names with significant spelling or legibility issues in a TLD context — names that would consistently be misspelled, mispronounced, or misunderstood by people unfamiliar with them — were also set aside. Part of the utility of a permanent address is that it can be communicated clearly. If you’re giving your address to someone verbally, or printing it on a physical document, the TLD needs to be immediately parseable. Names with unconventional vowel sequences, silent letters, or unusual stress patterns create friction that compounds over time.

The harder question: who are we to decide?

We want to be honest about something uncomfortable. Every decision we made about which names to secure and which to leave was made by us — a small group of people with our own perspectives, our own biases, and our own relationship to Queensland. We do not pretend that we got every decision right. We made the best judgements we could with the criteria we’d developed, and we tried to be rigorous and honest in applying them.

But the places we didn’t secure are real places, and the people who live in them are real communities. If someone from Townsville reads this and feels that we undervalued their city, that feeling is legitimate. If someone from the Whitsundays thinks we got the tourist-versus-resident distinction wrong, they might be right. We’re not positioning these decisions as infallible. We’re sharing them because we think the process of making them is worth understanding.

What we are confident about is this: the alternative to deliberate selection was indiscriminate expansion. And indiscriminate expansion, in a permanent system, is dangerous. It means deploying infrastructure prematurely into communities that haven’t asked for it and might not be ready for it. It means creating namespaces that dilute the quality of the ecosystem before it has a chance to establish itself. It means prioritising the appearance of comprehensiveness over the reality of usefulness.

We preferred to build less and build it right.

What “right” looks like in this context

The six TLDs we secured have one thing in common: they are names that Queenslanders and the world already use, without hesitation, to mean something specific and enduring. They are not aspirational names. They are not marketing exercises. They are not administrative labels dressed up as community identities.

.queensland is the state — the whole thing, the identity that ties together everything from the Torres Strait to the Tweed. It’s the name Queenslanders reach for when they want to say something about where they’re from in the most expansive sense.

.qld is the abbreviation — the shorthand that Queenslanders actually use in daily life, on letterheads and in addresses and in conversation. It has the directness of lived usage.

.brisbane is the capital — but more than that, it’s the name that anchors the largest, most culturally complex urban community in the state. It is a city that is growing into genuine global significance, and the address ecosystem needs to grow with it.

.surfersparadise is one of the most globally recognisable Australian place names in existence. It is a single, vivid idea that lands the same way everywhere in the world.

.gold-coast is the region that contains Surfers Paradise and extends north and south into an entire coastal urban corridor with its own identity, its own culture, its own ambition. The Gold Coast is not just a tourist destination. It is a city of real lives, real businesses, real community.

.brisbane2032 is the Games — the moment when Brisbane becomes the host of the world’s most watched sporting event, and everything the city is building toward, everything it wants to say about itself to the world, crystallises into a single landmark moment.

Six names. Each earning their place.

The ones that might come later

We are not closing the door on anything. The framework we built for making these decisions is not a framework for permanent exclusion — it’s a framework for knowing when a decision is ready to be made.

Cairns might be ready when the broader ecosystem has demonstrated what permanent onchain addresses mean for a community. The Sunshine Coast might be ready when the identity question resolves itself further. Townsville might be ready when the conversation there is fully underway.

We’re watching all of those conversations. And we’re watching them honestly, not as an exercise in manufacturing demand, but because we believe the right time to build infrastructure for a community is when that community is genuinely ready to use it — not when it’s convenient for us.

What we’re not going to do is move quickly just because we can. The whole point of permanent infrastructure is that it outlasts urgency. It doesn’t need to be rushed. The names we didn’t secure are still out there. The communities attached to them are still living their lives. Nothing is lost by taking the time to get it right.

That, in the end, is what this project is about: building something that belongs to the people it names, permanently, and having the discipline to know the difference between the names that are ready and the names that aren’t.

We’re glad we kept the list short. We hope the names we chose prove that restraint was the right call.