Tonight at the DNSSEC Implementers Gathering at ICANN 49 in Singapore, I was seated next to an attendee from the registry in Portugal that operates the .PT top-level domain and she let me know about some dramatic growth they had recently seen. She also clued me in to their dnssec.pt page that has their statistics and also info about DNSSEC workshops and other events (I’ve now added this to our DNSSEC Statistics page). As noted on the chart below from March 14, 2014, the big jump that happened for them was when their second largest registrar/DNS hosting provider jumped from 200 to 4,000 .PT domain names signed with DNSSEC.
This is compared to the chart from only 11 days earlier showing Flesk at 199 signed domains. In speaking with her this jump was apparently not due to any incentives but rather to a registrar looking to do the right thing and provide more security options to their customers.
Congratulations to the team at .PT for seeing this big jump in second-level domains!