MARKET INTELLIGENCE

Who Is Buying .si Domains? Investors vs. End Users

Buyer concentration, end-user exceptions, and the evidence behind the .si market.

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If you lined up every .si buyer from 2026, the queue would be short — and nearly everyone in it would be a domain investor.

That is not an insult. It is the single most important fact about this market. Domain extensions become valuable when operating companies choose to build on them. Right now, the .si buyer base is investors selling to investors, and the data says so from three independent directions.

The short answer

For confirmed .si domain sales, keep the buyer evidence separate from asking-price claims.

Nearly every .si transaction in 2026 traces to domain investors. Buyer concentration is extreme — a handful of accounts for a large share of volume. Genuine end-user adoption is limited to two confirmed cases and one claimed one. If you are pricing a .si name on expected end-user demand, you are pricing on evidence that does not yet exist.

The buyer map: what the data shows

The first-half picture (Domain Name Wire, June 11, 2026). Andrew Allemann analyzed the 35 .si domains NameBio reported sold from January through June 9, 2026. The findings:

Only two sales looked like end-user purchases: Recursive.si ($20,000) and Military.si ($1,795).
Of the rest, 12 pointed to Afternic landers and 9 to Spaceship landers — the standard footprint of investor-held inventory.
Nine of that month's 13 sales went to a single domain investor in China — one buyer accounting for 43% of all public .si sales in 2026 to that point.
Another five went to a Singapore investor using a premiumdoms.io email address.
Sixteen buyers total were responsible for the entire year's public sales.

The wave-era picture (September–October 2026). The pattern repeated at larger scale:

Netcraft found that 52% of first-wave .si registrations at Dynadot — the September 19–22 window between the Truth Social poll and the UN speech — were immediately listed for resale on Dynadot's aftermarket. Names bought before the speech (donaldjtrump.si, superintell.si, boeing.si, puffin.si, vaccination.si) were listed for sale right after it. That is not end-user behavior; it is front-running.
Sully, operator of the investor platform NotRenewing (~October 1): 44 .si names sold to 21 different buyers, and three buyers accounted for 21 of those sales — nearly half the platform's .si demand in three accounts. "That isn't a market yet. That's a few guys with a thesis and a credit card."
The second wave, after the September 29 executive order, carries a different signature: registrations concentrated at OpusDNS, a reseller-oriented registrar with bulk-management tooling. When purchases flow through resellers, the final holder is harder to see — which means part of the current boom is difficult to attribute, and attribution difficulty itself favors the wholesale interpretation.

Put together: the .si buyer base in 2026 is a small number of investors, some of them buying in bulk, most of them relisting quickly. This is wholesale demand — liquidity among speculators — not retail demand from companies.

The end-user exceptions

Real end users exist. There are very few of them, and being precise about who they are matters more than inflating the list:

Recursive — recursive.si. Richard Socher's superintelligence startup, which raised roughly $650M in 2026 from backers including GV, NVIDIA, AMD, and Greycroft. It bought recursive.si for $20,000 in May 2026 — pre-wave — and 301-redirects it to recursive.com. This is the single best end-user proof point in the entire .si market, and it predates the political catalyst. The company is literally in the superintelligence business; the domain is an exact thesis match.
Militaria.pl — military.si. A Polish military supply store, $1,795 (June 2026). A genuine end user — but this is European local use of a national ccTLD, not adoption of the "SI = Super Intelligence" thesis.
Marqo — marqo.si (claimed). Marqo.ai of San Francisco, a "Commerce Superintelligence" company, is reported in a NamePros showcase thread to be using marqo.si alongside its main marqo.ai domain. Treat this as claimed, not confirmed — it rests on a single forum source.

That is the complete list. Two confirmed, one claimed, and the strongest of the three bought before the wave began.

The adoption gap

The sharpest evidence is negative. Leanne Mac's ProductHunt TLD tracker, cited by Domain Name Wire on October 1, recorded zero startup launches on .si in the last 30 days — against fifty launches on .ai in the same period. Startups are the buyers every .si investor is waiting for, and as of early October, none have shown up.

Allemann's summary stands: "What I don't see evidence of (yet) is adoption by actual companies. Most aftermarket transactions can be tracked back to domain investors, not businesses. They have been relisted at higher prices."

There is also a structural reason adoption may lag even if the thesis is right: Google's Search Central documentation lists .ai among the ccTLDs it treats as generic, but .si is absent from that list — so Google geotargets .si sites to Slovenia, a ranking handicap for exactly the US startups investors hope will buy. An end user considering .si as a primary domain is buying an SEO headwind along with the name.

What would change the picture

The wholesale verdict is a snapshot, not a prophecy. Here is what to watch — the signals that would actually move .si from speculation toward a market:

Startup launches on .si. The ProductHunt TLD tracker is the cleanest public signal. The first month with meaningful .si launches matters more than any registration record.
"SI" escaping the executive branch. The September 29 executive order directs the executive branch to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in specified official communications and non-statutory documents. Allemann's test is the right one: "Continued growth will depend a lot on whether anyone other than the U.S. government starts referring to AI as SI." Watch company rebrands, product names, and press releases — not government memos.
September 2027 renewals. As Sully put it: "I'll be watching next year's renewal numbers." Registrations are intentions; renewals are convictions. The share of the 46,066 September registrations that renew will tell you whether this was a market or a moment.

Until one of those signals fires, treat every .si transaction as wholesale until proven otherwise.

The bottom line

The .si buyer base in 2026 is concentrated, investor-led, and fast to relist: one buyer took 43% of first-half sales, three buyers took nearly half of one platform's wave-era volume, and over half of first-wave registrations were listed for resale within days. End-user adoption is two confirmed companies and one claimed one. Price accordingly — and if you are buying to sell to another investor, know that you are buying the last chair in musical chairs.

Researching who might actually buy a domain — .si or otherwise? DomainOka's investment analysis maps realistic buyer categories before you commit capital.