AI.com sold for $70 million in biggest confirmed domain name deal
The founder of cryptocurrency trading platform Crypto.com has purchased the domain AI.com for a record $70 million, marking the highest publicly disclosed price ever paid for a domain name. The purchase is in preparation for the launch of a new contender in the agentic artificial intelligence space.
Kris Marszalek, co-founder and chief executive of Crypto.com, unveiled AI.com during an advertisement that aired last weekend. The website is expected to provide a personal “AI agent” that allows users to send messages, run applications, and trade stocks, but it appears to be in beta for now.
The purchase price was not mentioned by Marszalek, but it was confirmed by the broker who handled the deal, Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com. Interestingly, the payment was made entirely in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller.
Crypto.com, which brought Marszalek to the public eye, entered an already competitive cryptocurrency exchange market when it launched in 2016 as “Monaco”. Later, the company paid $12 million to the cryptographer Matt Blaze, who registered the domain Crypto.com in 1993 and held it for over two decades.
This deal adds to a long list of domains sold for extremely high prices. Though the $70 million paid for AI.com is the highest confirmed amount to date, other reported prices far exceed it. In 2007, Business.com was sold for a reported $345 million, though that was never confirmed.
According to proponents, the value of these short, expensive domain names lies in the trust they convey. Yet many challenge this notion, noting that domains with simple names are rarely the dominant players in their respective markets. Generic names are rarely what comes to mind when users look up online services, and that explains why email.com is not among the top email providers, and why Music.com is a single webpage with basically no content instead of being a dominant music-streaming service.
Of course, AI is a new field, and disruptions are to be expected as new players enter the market with creative new concepts. So even though it’s unlikely that AI.com will dethrone ChatGPT or Gemini in the short term, the possibility is still there in the long term.
