DomainDrift 1.97: look up any of two million domains and read its signed history

DomainDrift keeps a signed, dated record of how the internet's surface moves: who hosts a domain, who handles its mail, who issues its certificate, whether it answers at all and why not. The last post was about what the record can now tell you. This one is about how much of the internet is in it.

As of 1 August 2026: 2,050,978 domains cataloged, 1,971,849 with at least one signed reading, watched domains re-checked every 5 minutes, every observation Ed25519-signed and notarized on Base in 15-minute windows.

Two million domains, and yours is probably already one of them

The catalog covers 2,050,978 domains across 79 categories, and roughly doubled over the past few weeks. That matters for one practical reason: the first question anyone asks is whether their own domains are in it, and the answer is now usually yes before they have signed up for anything. Any domain in the catalog can be looked up free, and the lookup returns a real current reading rather than a teaser.

The second number is the one worth reading carefully. 1,971,849 of those domains already carry at least one signed reading. The other 79,129 are catalogued and queued but have not been read yet, and their pages say so rather than rendering an empty record as a finding. Both figures are published, not just the flattering one, because a coverage claim with no denominator under it is not a claim.

The archive behind that is past 22 million signed readings, and it grows every minute the scanner runs.

The domains you name come round every five minutes

Put a domain on watch and it moves onto a different footing: it is re-read every five minutes rather than waiting for the survey to come round. That is the lane that decides how quickly a change becomes an alert, so it is the number worth being honest about.

So the product publishes what the lane is actually achieving, not what it promises. If the watched set ever grows past what the lane can serve in five minutes, the cadence it reports moves and says so, and every watched domain slows a little rather than some of them being quietly dropped. A monitoring product that cannot tell you how fresh its own monitoring is has not really told you anything.

What a reading carries

Every reading is Ed25519-signed the moment it is taken. That does two things and it is worth being precise about which two: it proves the reading came from DomainDrift, and it proves the reading has not been altered since. It does not prove the reading is correct. You can sign a mistake, and the signature will verify perfectly.

What signing buys is accountability. Our name is on every reading, permanently, and we cannot alter it, backdate it, walk it back, or deny having said it. That is more to trust, not less, and it is the part of this that is worth paying for.

The on-chain layer adds the one thing a signature cannot: independent time. Every signed reading taken in a 15-minute window is committed to Base in a single entry, so the block's own timestamp is a third party's record that the reading already existed when we say it did. Any reading traces to its window and that window to the transaction, and the whole check runs in your browser against published keys.

Where to start

Look up any domain free at domaindrift.io, check a receipt at domaindrift.io/verify, or put one domain on watch and point an alert at your channel.