Results · 2026-05-20

# CIRA TBR Drop — May 20, 2026

9,735 domains hit the pool. 217 got caught. That's a 2.23% take rate—a whisper of activity that says the hunters were either picky or tired.

WHC Online Solutions Inc. ran this week like a Zamboni driver who knows the rink by heart. They took 125 domains, more than half the total catch, working with surgical precision across the board. BareMetal.com inc came in second with 44 but showed sharper taste—they pulled drivers.ca, peptides.ca, marvellous.ca, assemblies.ca, opaline.ca, and methanol.ca, all solid dictionary words with clean commercial appeal. Webnames.ca Inc. (22), MyID.ca INC. (18), and the rest picked at the scraps like seagulls at a Gardiner expressway rest stop.

The real story? WHC dominated through volume, but not finesse. They snagged some.ca—a brand-100 four-letter gem that was always going to disappear—along with macaroni.ca, pagaille.ca, zootherapie.ca, spaceflights.ca, napster.ca, and toothless.ca. Smart work. BareMetal earned the style points, though. Six grabs and each one punches above its weight. Meanwhile, DomainePlus.com swung twice and connected twice: valkyrie.ca and vague.ca both landed. That's discipline.

What stung harder was what didn't get caught. usda.ca and suce.ca—both brand-100, four-character bullets—slipped through the open pool like nobody was watching. cuds.ca too. Even stronger names like scribbles.ca, stopwatch.ca, whine.ca, trowel.ca, and easting.ca sat unclaimed. These aren't obscure: they're words with actual meaning and reach. Either the registrars were running light staffing, or they'd already filled their bags from earlier drops and weren't hungry anymore.

The 2.23% catch rate tells you this wasn't a feeding frenzy. It was careful, selective, and frankly a bit lean. WHC played volume poker while BareMetal played quality chess. The open pool is going to have some genuine finds buried in it—names that would've been gold in 2019, still solid in 2026, and somehow nobody moved. That's either a massive miss or a statement that the registrars' clients are asking for something different now. Either way, there's money left on the table in the TBR pool this week.