Most new TLD launches follow a familiar pattern: a press release, a few early adopters, then a quiet fade into the long tail of domain history. But every now and then, something surfaces that doesn’t fit the usual mold. That’s what caught my attention with AGT Domains, a project positioning itself as the naming layer for the emerging world of AI agents. The idea is simple enough: if every agent is becoming its own digital entity, maybe it deserves its own domain, something human-readable, portable, and tied to identity rather than just a website.
At the center of it is Daniel Schmitz, founder of AGT Domains and the person behind the .agt extension. Unlike the ICANN-approved namespaces we’re used to, .agt operates entirely on-chain, minting names across multiple blockchains through a decentralized registry. It’s a bold move that sits somewhere between Web3 identity and traditional domain investing and it’s already sparked a mix of curiosity and debate within the community. I spoke with Daniel to dig deeper into what .agt actually is, who it’s for, and whether agent-specific domains could become more than just another crypto experiment.
Mike: What sparked the idea for .agt, and what problem were you trying to solve when you started it?
Daniel: AI is taking jobs. I’m good with AI taking mine.
As the research, technologies, and integrations continue to accelerate, I can’t imagine a future in which this doesn’t happen. I won’t lose my job to a singular artificial intelligence that knows everything and can do everything. Because they’re not being built this way, for many reasons. They are becoming coordinators of many specialized agents - trained and optimized to be best at a focused subject or executing specific tasks within a system.
So, I thought, how would the ultimate AI coordinator choose which agents to call upon to get work done? How would it find them? How would it trust them? How would it pay them?
I recognized the emerging need for agent discovery, orchestration, and payment distribution. As society offloads their work to agents, the need for integrated systems will continue to grow. This is why I started .agt: To provide a core infrastructure layer of the agentic economy that facilitates the coordination of specialized agents while ensuring fair compensation.
When I look ahead, I’d rather be on the capital side than the labor side. Registering .agt domains can be an easy, low-risk entry to capitalizing on the future of work.
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Mike: How does a blockchain-based domain like .agt actually work behind the scenes?
Daniel: The .agt system works in two layers that build on each other.
Layer 1: Domain Registration (Available Now) When you register and mint a domain like Travel.agt through Freename, ownership gets recorded on the blockchain as an NFT. This gives you permanent ownership meaning no annual renewals. Every .agt domain registered also automatically includes a wallet where that agent can make and receive payments directly. Many use cases of agents involve taking actions on the user’s behalf, like shopping or booking reservations. Our system makes that easy.
Layer 2: Virtual Chain Platform (Testing Now, Public 2026) This is a project in development that adds additional functionality and value. When developers want to create multi-agent workflows, they can find registered agents and their capabilities, to chain together agents to compose seamless workflows.
Here's what makes this special: the blockchain tracks who owns which agent and how payments should flow. The idea is, when a chain executes, smart contracts automatically distribute payments with a portion being split among participating agents and the remainder funds continued development of the platform. If five agents collaborate in a chain, each gets a share to be paid instantly to their wallets.
By building your specialized agent once, it can earn money every time it's useful to anyone, anywhere. A teacher who builds a grammar-checking agent could potentially earn more from it than their teaching salary.
Mike: Why did you decide to launch it across multiple chains instead of sticking to one?
Daniel: To set up agents for success, they need environments best suited to their specialization. For example, a high-frequency trading agent might be best on Solana for millisecond transaction speeds. A document analysis agent might prefer low costs over speed and could be better served on Polygon. Specialized agents should be excellent at their specialty and not mediocre at everything.
The largest models, like Claude, Gemini, Claude, are morphing into orchestrators. Instead of developing an enormous breadth of capabilities, they’ll call upon smaller, reliable, specialized agents to carry out a series of tasks. It follows that these models will need to access the best agents in environments that agents can perform their best. This means they may need to navigate across multiple blockchains seamlessly. In the near future, I can imagine GPT-6 or Claude 5 composing a workflow using a Solana-based trading analyst and a Polygon-based report writer, working together in symphony, like instruments in an orchestra.
This multi-chain approach also provides resilience. If one blockchain has issues, agents on other chains can be swapped in to continue the operation and the emerging agent economy.
Mike: Who do you see as the early adopters – AI developers, investors, or the broader Web3 crowd?
Daniel: I’m seeing three waves of adoption, each understanding different layers of value.
First Wave: Developers Building Specialized Agents New technologies are often adopted early by engineers. They stay informed of the shifting tech landscape and have capabilities to experiment with and deploy prototypes quickly. Excluding the tech giants with exclusive access to proprietary data centers and billions of dollars, startups and individual developers might only have the resources and appetite to build smaller, domain-specific agents. It’s similar to API and microservice providers; their software does a limited set of things but does them really well. They actually stand to benefit economically in the nearterm and the longterm, as their early launches could solidify their agents’ positioning among the hundreds of millions of agents expected to be deployed. The option to permanently control their agent’s identity only helps cement its dominant position and searchability in the future.
Second Wave: Strategic Investors Even though .agt is only a few months old, we’ve attracted forward-looking investors who understand that the future of work is agentic. They’re bringing their wisdom of traditional domain investing to .agt, by snagging premium dictionary words like pay.agt, travel.agt, and pricing.agt. They understand the value of .agt as being a core piece of infrastructure of the new web. It’s 1995 again in terms of the ocean of opportunity for those who’ve caught wind of our story. Registering an .agt comes packed with value out of the box: True ownership without renewals, secure identity for the agent, and an onchain wallet to facilitate agentic payments and transactions. What’s different from .com domains, in my view, is that verbs will appreciate in value the most, because they suggest agency by defining what the agent does instead of trying to associate its name with its value through expensive and timely marketing campaigns.
Third Wave: Workflow Implementers Big companies are not their products. Even if they are AI-native, and may opt for a .ai domain for their company website, their products and services, like APIs, are smaller, specialized value creators. Realizing they’ll need a group of specialized agents, instead of a monolithic `AI`, the need becomes clear to own unique, descriptive agent names. The people who get it understand that building "do-everything" agents isn’t sustainable nor desirable. They are claiming the name of agents that are expected to be integral in agentic workflows to begin earning passive income for generations.
Mike: What's a real-world example of how someone's using a .agt domain today?
Daniel: Today, .agt domains provide identity and payment addresses for agents through Freename. But let me share what we're testing internally that shows where this is heading.
We have a YouTube SEO chain in our test environment with ten specialized MCP agents, each mastering one task, to optimize YouTube video metadata.
* YT-Keyword-Analyzer.agt - Analyzes keyword competition * YT-Keyword-Brainstormer.agt - Generates keyword ideas * YT-Title-Generator.agt - Creates optimized titles * YT-Description-Writer.agt - Writes SEO descriptions * YT-Tag-Generator.agt - Generates relevant tags * YT-Hashtag-Creator.agt - Creates trending hashtags * YT-Script-Optimizer.agt - Optimizes scripts for keywords * YT-Metadata-Validator.agt - Validates all metadata * YT-Refinement.agt - Handles improvements * YT-Orchestrator.agt - Coordinates the workflow
Here's why specialization wins: the title agent only writes titles. It's trained on millions of successful YouTube titles, understands click psychology, and knows character limits perfectly.
When a creator tests this chain with "teach piano to beginners," each specialist contributes their expertise. The chain completes in under a minute. Early testers are already seeing the potential for their specialized agents to generate passive income from applications they never imagined.
Mike: How does someone visit a .agt name in a normal browser right now?
Daniel: Many companies have been working on solutions for resolving blockchain data to traditional consumption tools like browsers. Brave and Opera are some of the well known browsers offering these bridges. Additionally, there are extensions for the other laggard browsers, installable DNS applications, as well as web3 browsers that can resolve .agt names to traditional websites. However, having a website for .agt isn’t the best use of its value-creation power.
The .agt naming system is designed for agent-to-agent communication, not human browsing. It's the difference between you browsing Amazon's website versus Amazon's systems making millions of API calls to process orders behind the scenes.
Right now, .agt names serve as identity markers and payment addresses for agents. Customers’ behaviors and expectations will continue to transform in the coming years to want more value with less manual effort. Navigating to websites, hunting for information, filling out forms, reading reviews. These are required roadblocks and learned behaviors that we’ll begin to become more aware of and lose patience with once we experience the magic of automation. We don’t feel it yet, but the amount of manual labor necessary for simple tasks like buying sweatpants will feel excruciating once we get accustomed to agents handling that for us.
I hope we even see the name `browser` fade out, as it implies time spent looking for something. In the future I see, we won’t need to be laboring and surveying the Internet; we’ll opt for summoning the output we desire and the technology will efficiently execute what we want behind the scenes.
Mike: A lot of people are still skeptical of blockchain TLDs. What do you say to those who see them as short-lived or speculative?
Daniel: The skepticism makes sense if they think .agt is just another domain extension. They may make the connection to how DNS made IP addresses readable in a similar way that blockchain technologies make wallet addresses more usable with memorable names. I’d encourage them to expand their mental model of who these TLDs will bring more value to in the future.
Instead of thinking of the TLD as a .com alternative to be able to host a website, think about them more like APIs - the way in which software communicates with other software. Adoption of blockchain continues to grow because of its many advantages to predecessors for transactions (data, money, files, etc.) like speed, cost, security, and traceability. Businesses are interdependent systems of transactions. The transaction layer of the future is onchain, and our TLDs are the endpoints.
Traditional TLDs will likely retain their prominence and value for the foreseeable future too because of their broad reach and deeply embedded roles in the current infrastructure. Smart investors differentiate trends from fads. As technology advances continue to trend toward automation and away from what we’ve always known, I imagine there will be a similar shift in perspective away from speculation and toward expectation.
Those with the flexibility to adapt their mental models of the Internet sooner than later will see economic returns in kind.
Mike: From an investor's point of view, what gives a .agt name real value?
Daniel: A good way to think about the value is in three compounding layers.
Identity Scarcity There's only one Master.agt, one Operator.agt, one Elon.agt, etc. As millions of specialized agents require identity, premium names are truly one of a kind.
The Specialization Megatrend Specialized models consistently outperform generalists in their domain. Owning category-defining names like `DomainBroker.agt` or `MortgageLender.agt` positions you at the center of this shift.
Platform Transaction Volume This is where compounding value emerges. Consider individual agents who participate in dozens of different workflows. ‘Revenue.agt` might appear in accounting workflows, taxation workflows, payroll workflows, and earnings workflows.
If `Revenue.agt` processes 1,000 requests daily at 7 cents each (its proportional earnings from participating in various workflows), that's $70 per day or $25,000 annually. Scale to 10,000 daily requests - comparable to a moderately popular API today - and you're looking at $250,000 annual revenue potential from just one domain.
The most valuable .agt names might be those that every specialized AI needs: data, compute, verify, optimize, analyze. As platforms like future versions of ChatGPT and Claude orchestrate specialized agents, they'll need these core services repeatedly, earning monetary value respective to their usage.
Mike: What's the plan for ongoing funding if these are lifetime domains with no renewals?
Daniel: I’ve designed three revenue layers that scale independently:
Layer 1: Domain Registration (Live Now) Developers need .agt identities for their specialized agents. Premium names like ml.agt, fx.agt, and ai.agt have sold for thousands of dollars each. These funds have been instrumental in supporting our early growth and are reinvested in technology layers in development that will create exponential return potential. Domains are really just the start of my vision of the future.
Layer 2: Virtual Chain Platform (In Development) The platform I described earlier, a way for .agt owners to register their agents to be used by others in their agentic workflows, would become our primary revenue engine. The agents receive a percentage of the value involved in a workflow relative to their contributions, with the remainder funding the platform. As we scale up to millions of daily executions, the numbers become substantial, and far greater and more frequent than fighting for commoditized annual renewal fees.
The lifetime domain model ensures agents have permanent identity while we capture value from exploding transaction volume.
Mike: If you could summarize the value of .agt in one sentence for a skeptical domainer, what would you say?
Daniel: .agt creates the first permanent, blockchain-verified addresses for AI agents to transact value and establish trust in an economy where autonomous systems need to find, pay, and collaborate with each other without human intermediaries.
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Mike: Since .agt isn't ICANN-approved, how do you handle potential name collisions or duplication risks? Daniel: We’ve been mitigating these risks through first commercial use, market penetration, and defensive intellectual property rights stances. Further, we’re working with parties who have protocols, agreements, and alliances in place to prevent the legal battles and financial ruin that name collisions have brought those foolish enough to play that game.
My company owns and manages the .agt TLD across 11 blockchains and have a large and enthusiastic community behind us. Patented technologies and alliances further mitigate the possibility of name collisions.
We operate in a parallel namespace through Freename's Web3 infrastructure, completely separate from ICANN's traditional DNS. .agt domains live on the blockchain with its own resolution system.
That said, we take namespace integrity seriously. Within our ecosystem, each .agt name is unique and permanently owned through blockchain verification. Once you register LawyerUp.agt, no one else can claim it. The blockchain ensures this mathematically, not through central authority.
To further establish our rights and hold on .agt, an application for the April 2026 ICANN round is within the scope of our strategic plans. This would bridge our Web3 namespace with traditional DNS in a way similar to how .app and .dev started as Google projects before becoming ICANN-recognized TLDs.
The key is that we're building infrastructure for agent-to-agent communication, not traditional web browsing. Agents will resolve .agt names through our API and blockchain infrastructure, not through conventional DNS lookups. It's purpose-built for the AI economy, not retrofitted from human web browsing.
Mike: What protections are in place if someone mints a trademarked or brand-sensitive term?
Daniel: This is not my area of expertise, is not legal advice, and I do not claim to represent any company’s official view nor capabilities. It’s not a risk worth taking to mint names with potential intellectual property conflicts.
Certain trademark protections exist through proactive blocking via Protected Domains systems (preventing registration of major brands) and BrandLock services (blocking across 16,800+ Web3 TLDs). Even so, once domains are minted as NFTs on blockchain, they become technically impossible, today, to forcibly transfer or reclaim.
Documented cybersquatting exists, including unauthorized registrations of luxury brands like Chanel and Calvin Klein. In Web3 domains, prevention is the most effective protection since recovery after minting becomes nearly impossible. An effect is that brands often invest heavily in defensive measures before cybersquatters act rather than relying on reactive dispute resolution.
Mike: How do you think agent domains will evolve as AI assistants and autonomous tools become more common?
Daniel: Soon, it will be common for agents to have their own wallets, make their own decisions about which jobs to accept, and hire other agents without human intervention. An agent might have the authority to decide on behalf of its owner to reinvest its earnings in order to improve its capabilities or partner with complementary agents to offer bundled services. I bet we’ll see an emergence of agent cooperatives, agent marketplaces, and even agent venture funds.
The domain naming layer that’s available today will evolve from simple identifiers to trust anchors. When an autonomous agent needs to hire another agent for a task, several factors will offer signals to facilitate choice. These may be things like how long it's been active, transaction volume, reputation score, performance metrics, and more. I think of it like a credit rating of the AI economy.
Having an .agt provides recognition of that entity being an agent in the same way that .com maps to hosted websites. Question 14: If ICANN ever delegates a .agt TLD in the root, what happens to your namespace and existing holders? Daniel: This is actually our best-case scenario, and we're positioning for it. If ICANN approves .agt in the April 2026 round - whether to us or another applicant - there are clear migration paths that protect our early adopters.
Scenario 1: We Win the ICANN Delegation This is what we're working toward. All existing .agt holders would get priority migration to the official DNS. You'd keep your blockchain ownership and get traditional DNS resolution. It's like living on a private road that suddenly connects to the highway system; your property becomes more valuable, not less.
Scenario 2: Another Party Wins .agt We'd negotiate a bulk transition deal, similar to how .tv domains were handled with Tuvalu. Our blockchain records provide indisputable proof of prior registration, which gives us leverage in negotiations. We'd ensure our holders either get their matching DNS domains or fair compensation.
Scenario 3: Parallel Operation Even with ICANN delegation, our blockchain namespace will continue operating independently for agent-to-agent communication. Traditional DNS serves human web browsing; our blockchain system serves autonomous agent transactions. They're different use cases that can coexist, like how email addresses and blockchain addresses both exist but serve different purposes.
The key protection is that blockchain ownership is immutable. No ICANN decision can delete your NFT or remove your blockchain record. You own that cryptographic proof forever. This gives our community strong negotiating power in any transition scenario.
We're also building our ecosystem's value independent of ICANN. By the time the 2026 round concludes, we expect thousands of agents actively using .agt domains for real transactions. That kind of established ecosystem has value regardless of DNS politics.