While they confirmed all the way back in June that they had already hit their crowdfunding target, the dotFurry campaign hadn't posted any public news since the ICANN application window for new gTLDs closed last month. On Friday, they finally announced they had submitted their application1:
Hi all! Just a quick update: we’ve submitted our completed gTLD application to ICANN and paid the application invoice ($54,250). In the coming months, ICANN will review our application and do some due diligence as part of the pre-evaluation step.
Now we wait for their next update on ICANN's Reveal Day in October, when all the submitted applications will be made public. Although the new gTLD application fee has been covered, the campaign still anticipates "years of application review, legal work, and platform operations ahead" so are continuing to accept donations in the meantime.
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If .furry is successfully delegated it will be the first time we've had a dedicated furry TLD in the ICANN root but it wouldn't be first furry TLD ever. Back in 2003, Dennis Carr (who has a Dennis the Tiger fursona) created the .fur TLD which was peered with the OpenNIC alt root2. But this would only have been accessible to users who had reconfigured their clients to use a special set of DNS servers in order to resolve the .fur domains to IP addresses.
The TLD swapped hands a few times with Carr retiring it in 2007, it was recommissioned by OpenNIC in 2008 before decommissioning it themselves and by 2009 it was under the control of fellig.org3. I'm not sure exactly how much longer it lasted than this - looking at snapshots of Fellig's forums on the Internet Archive reveals users discussing it as recently as 2016 and 20194 but nic.fur no longer resolves to an address via OpenNIC's resolvers and there is no mention of the TLD on Fellig's current website.