2026-10-14

The .si Auction Event: What Bidders Actually Paid

A $50,000 headline sitting 4,170 times above a $11.99 registration: the .si market's 103 reported sales in 2026, a $5,008 median, the twelve names that set the ceiling, the venues they cleared on, and the 89,938 registrations that were the real event.

The .si auction event of October 2026 has one headline number: staffing.si at $50,000. It also has a floor number: $11.99, the first-year price of any .si name at a retail registrar this month. Both are true, both are in the same namespace in the same four weeks, and the distance between them — roughly 4,170 to one — is what "what bidders actually paid" means in a namespace mid-run.

We track .si with our own RDAP checks against the registry rather than reseller search boxes, and we log what sells. This is the October transaction data separated into the two markets that ran under one name: the aftermarket ladder everyone quoted, and the registration layer underneath it.

The reported market is small, and its median is $5,008

Start with the volume, because it reframes every price below it. As of 12 October 2026 the tracked .si market shows 103 reported retail sales in 2026, against 29 in all fourteen earlier years combined. The median sale is $5,008, up from $3,050 in the years before. 59 sales cleared at $5,000 or more, and 21 of them were five-figure.

Two things follow. A $50,000 headline is ten times the median, and only about a fifth of reported sales are five-figure at all — the other four fifths are not. And the venue spread tells you where the reported market clears: Sedo carries most of the volume, with Spaceship, Atom and private deals behind it.

The twelve names that set the ceiling

The top reported sales of 2026, with the venue and the day the sale was reported where our data partner publishes it:

• staffing.si — $50,000 — Spaceship
• gifts.si — $31,364 — fruits.co — 11 October
• hollywood.si — $30,000 — Sedo — 6 October
• runtime.si — $28,888 — Spaceship
• pure.si — $26,862 — fruits.co — 10 October
• bot.si — $20,000 — Sedo
• recursive.si — $20,000 — Spaceship
• travelagent.si — $19,988 — Spaceship — 5 October
• otherwise.si — $18,888 — Spaceship — 25 September
• timeline.si — $17,677 — Spaceship — 8 October
• betty.si — $17,500 — private deal — 6 October
• build.si — $17,435 — fruits.co

One more rung belongs in the same window: Caspian.si at $19,795, reported on 2 October from a registrar account manager's email and argued over on NamePros the next day. It lands between travelagent.si and otherwise.si, which is where the ladder keeps producing prices: the sixteen-to-twenty-thousand band.

The twelve names above add up to $298,602, an average of $24,884 each — and the step from the top rung to the second is -37.3%. Six of the twelve cleared on Spaceship, three on fruits.co, two on Sedo and one privately. Sedo carries most of the reported volume; the ceiling in this window was set on Spaceship's aftermarket.

One caveat matters more than the prices. The published records do not separate auction closes from fixed-price and brokered deals, and a $19,988 cheque at a live auction is different evidence from a $19,988 cheque negotiated over three weeks. Almost none of the numbers circulating are labelled with the mechanism.

The number that decides what most bidders paid: 89,938

The registry held 198,535 .si names on 23 September. On 5 October it held 288,473 — 89,938 new registrations in twelve days, a 45.3% jump at a pace near 7,500 names a day, in a namespace that had crawled for years.

The monthly figures are more lopsided still: the registry's own count for September is quoted as 44,000 in one interview with its spokesperson and 46,066 on its published chart in another, against 3,515 in August. The daily counter reads 4,794 names in 24 hours on 23 September, 13,603 a week later, and 19,541 on 9 October.

Put the two layers side by side. 103 reported sales in 2026 against 89,938 registrations in twelve days is 0.115%. Against the 288,473 names in the zone, 0.036%.

That ratio answers the headline question. Most bidders in the .si event did not bid — they registered, at $11.99 for the first year at a retail registrar or 10 euros at the registry, with $16.99 the renewal, and the overwhelming majority of those registrations have produced no reported sale, no website and no second buyer.

Who was on the other side of those registrations

Three data points from registrar-side reporting:

More than half of the .si names detected at Dynadot between the poll and the United Nations speech were promptly listed on Dynadot's own resale marketplace. Not projects: inventory, listed before the registration settled.

The post-order acceleration came from a reseller registrar. OpusDNS, launched in late 2025 and marketed to resellers, hosting providers and agencies, added .si on the afternoon of 23 September.

The buyers were not where the story said. Hostinger's country table covering nine days put India first at 3,174 names (25.5%) and the United States second at 3,135 (25.2%) — over half from two countries — then Morocco at 678, the UK at 425, Canada 409, Germany 374 and the UAE 363. On name classes, short names led at 1,554, tech-themed names followed at 1,040, and explicitly AI-named domains came last at 372 — about 3% of registrations, with short names outnumbering AI names 4.2 to 1.

Then the number that says who your exit is. Of 35 publicly documented .si sales in the first half of 2026, exactly two went to companies that use the domain — one of them the AI startup Recursive, which paid $20,000 for recursive.si.

You are not bidding against businesses. You are bidding against inventory that is mostly listed, mostly short, and mostly chasing the next buyer.

Buying today: the classes ran out while the story was written

As of 12 October, zero of the 17,576 possible three-letter .si names are still unregistered, and 5,746 were taken in the thirteen days since tracking began on 30 September. In the four-letter consonant-vowel class, 3,135 of 11,025 remain free, with 728 taken since 8 October. All 1,296 two-character names are registered, and none of the 1,000 three-digit names is confirmed free.

Our own registry checks read the same way. 676 two-letter combinations, 0 available. The 1,202 most common English words, 1 available. 121 technology and AI words, 0 available. On 8 October, 266 three-letter names were free in the morning and 28 by the evening. That is the point: whatever is still available was passed over by ninety thousand registrations and a month of keyword sweeps.

What we paid, for scale

Our ten .si names mirror the bottom of that distribution. Four are exact-match service words — chauffeurs, homestays, consultancies, postings — listed between $149 and $199. Six are AI-tool and service-category names — getupscale, getlogo, excavators, petsitting, treeservices, glassrepair — listed between $1,195 and $1,995.

Add all ten asking prices and you get $10,596. One sale near the bottom of the ceiling list, timeline.si at $17,677, is 1.67 times our entire .si portfolio at ask. That is why we price from bands rather than headlines: for a service word in .si, our bands are $49-$149 wholesale and $250-$800 end-user, which is where the visible volume actually trades.

Five rules the October data gives a bidder

1. Bid against the median, not the headline. The 2026 median is $5,008. The $50,000 sale is a brand purchase, not a comp.
2. The runner-up sets your price. Atom's published mechanics pay the winner one increment above the second-highest bid, with increments scaling to the high bid — so a one-bidder auction closes at the start price. Bids in the final ten minutes extend the auction by 60 minutes.
3. Check the registration date before the price. A name registered in the last four weeks is a markup on an $11.99 cost basis.
4. Price the renewal, not just the buy. 89,938 registrations in twelve days means 89,938 renewal decisions in late 2027 — about $1.53 million at $16.99 each.
5. Count the end users in the venue's own sales. Two out of thirty-five is the number that tells you who buys when you sell.

A ladder is a list of exceptions. The median is what the market paid.

What the event actually established

Two markets ran in parallel under one name. The registration layer was the event: 89,938 names in twelve days at roughly $12 each, two countries supplying half of them, more than half of one registrar's registrations listed for resale the same week, and every finite class from two characters to three letters consumed while the story was being written. The aftermarket ladder was the news: 103 reported sales in a year, a median of $5,008, 21 five-figure results, a ceiling set by generic English words on Spaceship, fruits.co and Sedo. The ladder is real, and it is about one tenth of one percent of the event. The next number that matters in .si is not a sale price — it is the renewal rate in late 2027.

Sources and method

• Reported sales and class counts: the .si market page of our data partner Appraise.net, as of 12 October 2026, sourcing NameBio — 103 reported sales for 2026, the $5,008 median, 59 sales at $5,000 or more, 21 five-figure sales, the ceiling table with venues and report dates, and the class counts. Their note applies here too: private and brokered deals often go unreported, so read counts as a floor and medians as indicative.
• Registry and registrar figures: register.si counters as reported by Netcraft on 1 October 2026 (198,535 names on 23 September; 4,794 to 13,603 in 24 hours; the Dynadot aftermarket share; the OpusDNS acceleration); the BBC's 1 October interview with register.si spokesperson Klara Herman (44,000 September registrations, 11,000 on 30 September); and TechRadar's reading of the registry counter on 9 October 2026 (19,541 in 24 hours; Hostinger's country table and name classes; the two-of-35 figure; registration and renewal pricing).
• Caspian.si is a NamePros thread from 3 October 2026 quoting a Dynadot account manager's email.
• Availability, class-exhaustion and portfolio figures are our own: RDAP lookups run from our own scripts, and the published buy-now prices on our portfolio page. A reseller search box is not evidence in either direction.
• Auction mechanics are quoted from Atom's published auction rules; our walk-through of the reserve arithmetic and the 150% BIN cap is here, and the registry-side story of how this namespace moved is here.