171,867 .top domains drop in a day! Has the big .Top domain name crash started?

5.5% of all .top domain names were removed from zone files today. Has the big .Top domain name crash started?

According to namestat.org 171,867 domains were removed from zone files yesterday leaving the .top extension with 2,957,488 domains. .Top is currently the New gTLD extension with the most domains. .Top is ahead of .xyz, .loan, .online, .club and .site that all have more than a million domains each.

.Top has had its ups and downs over the past years. .Top had more than 4.5 million domains in late 2016 but went down to 1,26 million in early 2018. .Top went up to 3.5 million domains in late 2018 but many .top domains had been dropping since then. Today were the most domains dropped in a single day.

Today’s drop is in direct correlation to a big jump in registrations that happened in February last year. Most possibly the jump was caused by very cheap .top domains being sold during a promotion.

93% of all .top domains are owned by people and companies in China. So if China leaves the .top extension millions of domains will be dropped.