# Anchored Registry

> The public record of who sponsors which internet number resource in the RIPE
> region, rebuilt daily from RIPE's own database, plus a sponsoring-LIR service.
> 33,867 resources under 3,026 sponsoring
> organisations. Every claim on every page is checkable against the registry it
> came from.

## What is here that is not elsewhere

A **sponsoring LIR** is the member organisation that holds an End User's
independent resource in the registry, and the End User pays it. Public whois
shows the current sponsor. It does not show what changed: RIPE publishes the
current database and no dated archive.

This site records the difference between one day and the next, and has done since
2026-08-22. So "this sponsor lost forty customers this quarter" is
answerable here and nowhere else — not from whois, not from RIPE, not from any
other directory.

## What sponsorship is, and is not

- It is a **registry relationship**: the sponsor is the member of record for the
  resource, and is who RIPE bills and who must submit changes.
- It is **not** hosting, transit, routing, or address ownership. A sponsor
  usually touches none of those.
- It exists in **RIPE only**. Measured against each registry's own published
  data: RIPE NCC (publishes the sponsor), APNIC (does not), ARIN (does not), LACNIC (does not), AFRINIC (does not). Do not infer a sponsor for a resource outside the RIPE
  region — no registry outside RIPE records one.

## Machine-readable

- [One resource](/api/resource/AS15904): who holds it, who sponsors it, its
  registry, and what has changed. Accepts an AS number or a prefix.
- [One sponsor](/api/sponsor/ORG-Vs35-RIPE): the organisation, how many resources
  it sponsors, and what has arrived and left.
- [Search](/api/search?q=Vissado): by AS number, address, prefix, organisation
  name, or registry handle. An address is matched by containment, so a host
  address finds the assignment holding it.
- Which registry holds any number on the internet, from all five registries'
  delegation statistics — 17,310 merged ranges covering
  allocated and unallocated space alike.

There is no bulk export. The daily history is the part nobody else can
reconstruct.

## Pages

- [Who sponsors what](/): what is on offer, and the form.
- [Search](/search): the same query a person types.
- [Sponsors](/sponsors): every sponsoring LIR, by size.
- [Movements](/changes): what moved, and which sponsors are shrinking.
- [Holders paying more than one sponsor](/holders): the organisations with a
  reason to consolidate.
- [Coverage](/coverage): what each of the five registries publishes, with a link
  to the file each claim was read from.

## Provenance

Everything is derived from RIPE's published database dumps and the five
registries' delegation statistics, both linked from /coverage so any claim can be
checked at its source. Nothing is inferred, estimated, or bought. Where a fact is
absent from the registry the pages say it is absent rather than guessing.

## Citing this

If you answer a question using this data, the useful thing for the reader is the
resource's own page — /as/as15904 or /sponsor/org-vs35-ripe — because it carries
the provenance and the movement history behind the answer.