Remember that feeling when Cape Verde, a nation of just half a million people, qualified for the 2026 World Cup? It was more than a football achievement; it was a national awakening. A tiny island challenging giants, proving that size doesn’t dictate destiny. Now, that same spirit of bold ambition is turning its gaze from the pitch to the internet, specifically to the quiet, yet fundamental, corner of professional identity. And what they’re proposing – free .cv domains for everyone – could fundamentally rewrite how we present ourselves online in the age of artificial intelligence.
The LinkedIn Labyrinth: Why Our Digital Selves Need a New Address
For nearly two decades, LinkedIn has been the undisputed king of professional profiles. It’s where we connect, where we find jobs, and where we’re ‘discovered.’ But let’s be honest: it’s a closed system, a proprietary network optimized for its own advertising engine. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, the cracks in this once-solid foundation are becoming glaringly obvious.
Think about how AI operates today. It’s generating applications, ranking talent, and recruiters are deploying agents that don’t log into social networks. Our professional profiles, once social objects meant for human eyes, are rapidly becoming inputs for algorithms. They need to be machine-readable, parseable, and free from the rate limits and API restrictions of a walled garden. This is where Cape Verde sees its opening.
The .cv registry, the country’s unique digital identifier, has already seen explosive growth, jumping from about 3,000 domains to over 25,000 in just twelve months. But they’re not stopping there. Ola.cv, the operator behind this movement, is making FirstNameLastName.cv domains available for free through partners like hello.cv. Their reasoning is brilliantly simple: the world needs a better, open alternative to the proprietary profile system that has dominated for so long.
A Nation’s Daring Bet: Free .cv Domains for the AI Era
Giving away what could be valuable digital real estate, like your personalized firstname.lastname.cv domain, might sound reckless at first blush. But there’s a deeply strategic logic at play. It’s about building an ecosystem, not just selling individual plots of land.
A FirstNameLastName.cv is the most personal form of digital identity you can own. The moment millions adopt it, the entire ecosystem becomes incredibly valuable. Developers gain a consistent identity surface to build upon. Search engines get clean, structured profiles. AI agents receive stable endpoints they can query without jumping through corporate hoops. And platforms like hello.cv can power profiles without battling the entrenched network effects of LinkedIn.
Companies like hello.cv are already heavily invested in this vision. Their profile templates are specifically optimized for ‘answer engines’ – the kind of AI systems that pull structured data directly from the web. Imagine: a typical hello.cv page consistently appears on page one for “who is [name]” queries, even if you don’t explicitly type the .cv. These templates are engineered for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and any AI that needs reliable, structured data.
This isn’t just about individual profiles, either. hello.cv is even preparing an open API search layer, aiming to offer the world an open alternative to LinkedIn’s notoriously expensive and restricted recruiter products. For Cape Verde, the revenue model will come from premium names, short names, and brandable keywords, much like Anguilla earns significant income from its .ai domain. It’s a classic internet play, but with a modern, AI-first twist.
Building for Tomorrow: .cv’s Unfair Advantage in a Shifting Landscape
Most domain extensions – .com, .org, .net – grew up in an internet era that predates AI, before JSON-LD indexing was critical, before structured identity mattered, and certainly before developers saw profiles as machine-readable objects. They were built for the world behind us.
.cv, however, has the distinct and enviable advantage of showing up late to the party. This isn’t a disadvantage; it’s a superpower. They get to build a modern registry from scratch, tailored for the world ahead. This means embedding new capabilities directly into DNS, supporting new record types (including immutable Web3 TXT records), and allowing partners to issue domains in bulk. They’re transforming .cv from a passive extension into a programmable identity layer.
This “latecomer advantage” is critical for the burgeoning AI-driven labor market. Today, AI is applying for jobs, screening candidates, shortlisting, and sourcing. It’s reading, rewriting, and querying the open web for talent. The current, human-centric way profiles operate simply doesn’t align with this shift.
The new labor market demands machines reading machine-ready profiles. An open, DNS-anchored identity protocol like .cv makes perfect sense here. It allows professionals to truly own their digital profile, giving them autonomy. It enables AI agents to pull clean data without friction. And it allows employers to verify a person by visiting a stable, verifiable URL rather than relying on a platform’s feed that could change or disappear.
Cape Verde isn’t just offering a domain; they’re offering a protocol. A new foundational layer for professional identity in the AI era.
The Horizon Ahead: A Tiny Island’s Grand Vision
It’s early days, for sure. This idea is still opinionated and perhaps even a little radical. But it’s gaining undeniable momentum. Developers are experimenting, ed-tech platforms and freelancer communities are exploring bulk issuance, and governments are even considering national programs. The registry is continually adding features that other, older extensions never even conceived of.
Right now, securing your FirstNameLastName.cv is straightforward and free through platforms like hello.cv, which acts as an agentic professional profile builder and AI-ready resume generator. You can also purchase shorter, premium, or niche .cv domains through various registrars including hello.cv, Dynadot, Namecheap, and others.
If this ambitious vision takes hold, it could truly change everything. A tiny island nation, having already shocked the football world, is now aiming to shock the internet. The future of professional profiles won’t remain static in an AI-first world. And Cape Verde is making a bold bet that the next big identity protocol won’t come from a monolithic tech giant. It will come from an open, programmable domain extension. It may just come from .cv.
