One really exciting feature that went live recently is the new on-boarding scheme. In this scheme, users are able to obtain a free subdomain when signing up in the Blockstack Browser.
Additionally, we added support for name resolution on those names while they are still pending. This means that blockstack.js functions like lookupProfile and multi-player getFile should work for those names, right off the bat.
However, the names don’t have all the features of fully confirmed names. Importantly, these names will not show up in queries for all existing names (because subdomain registrars are a decentralized system, this would require some amount of decentralized crawling, which a blockstack-core node will not do). This means that pending names won’t show up in search indexes either. Once the name fully confirms (this takes roughly 1.5 hours, depending on how quickly blocks are discovered), the name will be picked up by the indexer on its next re-index (this depends on the configuration of the indexer).