Nominet announced last week they had come to an agreement with Minds + Machines (MMX) that will see the .uk registry become the registry for an additional 28 generic top level domains.

It’s claimed to be the largest transition of gTLDs to date, a significant step forward for Nominet in the Registry Service Provision (RSP) market and one which catapults them into the top ten RSPs globally.

The move sees them add the 291,000 domains from MMX to the 13,000 .cymru and .wales domains Nominet already provide registry services for as well as the 10.711 million .uk domains to take their total domains under management to over 11 million.

The partnership with MMX builds on Nominet’s expertise in running TLDs. From working with brands like the BBC, Comcast and Bentley to build their personalised online spaces; to our experience in geographic TLDs such as .cymru and .wales. But this is their first foray into gTLDs. And Nominet says they’ll be actively pursuing other opportunities in this space.

ICANN has also previously selected Nominet as one of their few emergency back-end registry operators (EBERO) for new gTLDs and they are the only one to have done a live test to date. This experience ensures Nominet can successfully manage what they believe is the largest migration of gTLDs to a new back-end registry services provider so far.

They are reported to be, according to Domain Incite, “among the 20-plus companies that have responded to Public Interest Registry’s request for proposals, as its back-end deal with Afilias comes to an end.”

In their announcement of the partnership, MMX also said they have signed an agreement for Uniregistrar, Corp., part of Uniregistry, to take over MMX’s loss-making consumer-facing mindsandmachines.com branded registrar operation.

“These two transactions allow us to reboot our business as a pure-play, high-value registry group with dramatically reduced overheads,” said Toby Hall, CEO of MMX. “Firstly, the Nominet agreement provides us with the flexibility to now significantly scale the business, on economically sure-footing, safe in the knowledge our domains will be running on a world-class platform. Secondly, the Uniregistry agreement sends a definitive message out to the registrar channel that we are here to partner, not compete, while ensuring existing customers of our consumer-facing registrar are migrated onto an award-winning platform. As such, we believe these two agreements will transform our operations and cost-base.”