Most founders pick a domain by asking one question: "Is the .com still free?" If yes, buy. If no, rename or add a prefix. The instinct treats a domain as an address — a string people use to find you.
Ten years of working through this question has slowly convinced us that a TLD isn't an address — it's a tone of voice. .com says one thing. .ai says another. .cn, .io, .xyz each say a different thing. Picking a TLD is picking the voice you want to use.
.com: established, but freighted
.com is the default. When a product wants to be taken seriously, when strangers should be able to type the URL by reflex, when the investor diligence spreadsheet has a column called "do they own the .com" — .com still wins.
But .com carries baggage: it presumes "we are an established tech company." That tone fits Stripe, Notion, Linear — products that have already validated themselves. For a project still in its forging phase, putting on .com is like engraving a name on a sword that hasn't left the furnace yet. Too early. We didn't want to pretend.
.ai: precise, but pigeonholing
.ai has been the hottest TLD of the past two years. It writes "we are an AI company" directly into the domain — no explanation needed. Anthropic.com is an exception; most post-2023 AI startups went for .ai.
But .ai pigeonholes you. A user seeing .ai automatically expects an LLM-shaped product. That label fits pure AI tools but mis-leads for what is actually "personality infrastructure." Ganjiang is not just AI — Ganjiang gives agents a stable self. .ai would have made us sound like we're racing on speed, not doing slow, careful work.
.cn: domestic, but only half a story
.cn is the obvious move — our servers are in Shanghai, ICP-licensed, primary users mainland CN. But .cn presumes one thing: your product targets only China.
Ganjiang isn't that. The international mirror (agentsoul.market) and the China site (ganjiang.xyz) share the same core method — Enneagram + soul files + three forging modes. .cn would lose international users in the first second; meanwhile it doesn't earn extra trust from CN users either (CN users look at the ICP filing, not the TLD). So .cn is the "cheap but only half the audience" option.
.xyz: undefined, exactly right
Stack it all up and .xyz turns out to be the closest fit:
- It doesn't demand you prove you're "an AI company" (.ai requires it), "an established company" (.com implies it), or "a Chinese company" (.cn limits it). It demands one thing: that what you put behind those three letters earns them.
- It pairs naturally with the name Ganjiang. An ancient personal name + an undefined TLD reinforces "this project defines itself" rather than borrowing definition from elsewhere.
- It carries no negative association in either CN or international audiences. Domestically, .xyz is already a common AI-project TLD. Globally, .xyz is mainstream Web3 / AI.
We did seriously consider the others. .io is too generic, no specific voice; .tech is too self-announcing; .app boxes us into being an app rather than infrastructure; .dev keeps regular users at arm's length. Each one carried more semantic load than .xyz did.
ganjiang.xyz took us a year to confirm. Its strength isn't only that it was available, cheap, memorable — it's that the tone it sends matches what we're trying to do: "this is a project still in the forge, building a trustworthy soul for AI agents, but it doesn't need a top-level domain to vouch for it."
“A domain is a self-introduction. We chose .xyz because what we wanted to say was: come look at the product, don't pre-judge by the cover.”