We had the wildest 24 hours
Brave joined Agent Community, then put us on the new-tab background for 24 hours. 4,777 signups, 1,424 organizations, zero incidents. Download the backgrounds at the bottom.
We had the wildest 24 hours
Brave joined Agent Community recently. Then their growth team had an idea: put us on the background of every Brave new-tab for 24 hours.
We said yes. They built it. May 25, midnight Eastern: live.
What happened in 24 hours
| New signups | 4,777 |
| Organizations | 1,424 |
| Individuals | 3,353 |
.agent pre-registrations | 10,980 |
| Community size before → after | 22,313 → 27,090 |
| Daily growth | +21.4% |
Brave-attributed (server-side source=BRAVE) | 3,888 |
| Organic / friends-of-friends spillover | 889 |
| Infrastructure incidents | 0 |
| Email pipeline failures | 0 across ~13,200 sends |
For context: the day before this saw 7 signups. Yesterday was roughly 590× normal volume.
Who joined (the actual ICANN-relevant story)
Not naming specific organizations here, since some asked us not to and the members directory is public anyway. The institutional mix is what matters:
- A sitting town mayor from Europe, an elected official, signed up personally from the official town hall address
- A national government research institute, EU-recognized
- A US accredited private university
- A 49-year-old federally qualified community health center
- A nonprofit climate journalism organization
- A Fortune 250 public utility
- Multiple YC-backed agent-native startups
- A GTM unicorn
- A known legal-AI company
- The privacy blockchain
Civic institutions. Accredited education. Regulated industry. Agent-native builders. All in one 24-hour window. That is exactly the cross-sector breadth ICANN's Community Priority Evaluation actually rewards.
The funny moment
Six hours in, I checked Google Analytics. It showed about 5,000 active users for the last 30 days. Not the day. The month.
Our server-side signup count was already past 2,500 for the day alone.
Brave is a privacy browser. Its built-in Shields block Google Analytics by default. The whole campaign was happening in front of a tool that could not see it. We wired up Cloudflare Web Analytics mid-surge, which is first-party and survives Shields. Lesson logged: distribution channels and the tools you use to measure them are not always on speaking terms.
What it means
We are applicants for .agent. We are not a registry. ICANN decides whether the community application clears the evaluation bar.
What did change yesterday is the evidence. Adding 1,424 organizations in a single day brings the org count past 7,000. Some are public infrastructure operators and elected officials. The breadth is now hard to dismiss as tech-industry hype.
Thanks to Brave
For the partnership. For the new-tab idea. For betting on community-governed infrastructure when the easy thing is to let one company own the layer.
If naming for AI agents should be community-governed instead of owned by one company: agentcommunity.org. Free. Adds your name to the evidence.
The three backgrounds, as they ran
Real screenshots from Brave mobile during the takeover. Three different background themes, all live on millions of new-tabs. Tap to download for your phone:
Receipts: Members directory · Charter and governance · Why .agent matters · Community Priority Evaluation (ICANN)