Original Title: "From a $70 Million Sky-High Transaction to a First-Day Outage: The 'Rough' Debut of ai.com"
Original author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
Last weekend, aside from the "Bithumb Airdrops 620,000 BTC" misunderstanding, another breakout news sparked heated discussions: the mysterious buyer behind the top-level domain ai.com has finally been revealed. Surprisingly to many, the buyer is not from a major AI company, but Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com.
The $70 million deal, reached in April 2025, gives outsiders a direct sense of the staggering financial power of crypto bigwigs. This transaction not only ended the dispute over the domain's ownership, but also put an end to the previous "battle for top-level domain pointers" among giants like OpenAI and xAI.
The ai.com Domain Name Dispute: A 3-Year High-Value Transaction War
In November 2022, after the emergence of ChatGPT (GPT 3.5), AI suddenly became a prominent field of study, and the prices of related domain names naturally rose accordingly.
In February 2023, there were rumors that OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT, had purchased ai.com, but the news was later confirmed to be false. Nevertheless, the domain's listed sale price of 11 million USD in 2021 is still astonishing.
In August 2023, the ai.com domain was redirected to xAI, the AI company owned by Musk, which once again attracted considerable attention.
Since then, more information about this top-level domain has also been uncovered: the domain was first registered in May 1993, over 30 years ago, making it an old and historically significant domain. However, Musk remains indifferent to the matter, once again making the market clear that changing the domain's pointing address is merely a marketing tactic by the owner of the ai.com domain to "wait for a price."
Until it reappeared in the public eye, it was recently exposed asPriced up to 70 million USD" message.
Public information shows that Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek successfully acquired the top-level domain, setting one of the highest domain name transaction records disclosed to date; the deal was facilitated by domain broker Larry Fischer, and the payment was made in cryptocurrency. For reference, this high price is twice the previous sale price of the top-level domain voice.com.
As an established cryptocurrency trading platform founded in 2016, Crypto.com has always been renowned in the industry for its "massive marketing efforts," having previously promoted its brand through sports sponsorships and celebrity endorsements; in 2021, it even spent a staggering 700 million dollars to secure the naming rights for a stadium in Los Angeles.
While being interviewed by the media, Kris Marszalek revealed, "We have received even more exaggerated reselling offers, but we still choose to hold onto the domain name," because he believes this domain name is crucial to the trust and awareness of future business. Not only that, he even boldly declared, "Back then, we broke through among thousands of cryptocurrency trading platforms, and this time we will make ai.com successful again."
Since then, the years-long bidding war around the top-level domain ai.com has come to an end; just as the market was full of expectations and speculations about how Kris Marszalek would use this domain, unexpectedly, he directly "pulled a big one."
Fubared "Product Launch": ai.com went offline within less than 48 hours after launch
Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek posted that after buying the domain name, they have been quietly Buidling, and will launch the product during the Super Bowl game on Sunday (February 8). He then stated that with the AI Agent on the ai.com platform, users will soon be able to deploy their own agents to perform a range of actions on their behalf, such as stock trading, automating workflows, using calendars for scheduling, and performing daily tasks. All these operations will remain private, based on user permissions, and fully controlled by the user.
And just as everyone was eagerly anticipating, ai.com staged a "server outage drama" within less than 48 hours of its launch.
This morning, NVIDIA engineer Yuhang posted, "This 70 million dollar domain, after running 8 million dollars worth of ads (note: the general price of a Super Bowl ad), resulted in a 504 error."
It has to be said that this incident once again proves the saying—"The whole world is just a bigger makeshift troupe."
As of the time of writing, the ai.com website has returned to normal operation, allowing users to pre-register personal subdomains and AI Agent subdomains for convenient access to the platform's corresponding features later; as for whether the "autonomous AI Agent" mentioned in Kris Marszalek's grand vision can be realized, the author will reserve judgment for now.
Crypto bigwigs' "mainstream journey": some buy houses, others buy power plants
The other hot topic stirred up by the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com spending 70 million dollars to purchase a top-level domain is the various mainstream paths that crypto bigwigs have chosen for themselves.
Previously, Justin Sun spent one million dollars to have lunch with Warren Buffett. Recently, the operations of cryptocurrency bigwigs have become even more diverse:
Aave founder Stani Kulechov bought a mansion worth 22 million pounds (about 30 million US dollars) in the London Notting Hill area last November.
Tether CEO Paolo is more focused on "not putting all eggs in one basket." According to reliable sources, Tether has invested the profits from its stablecoin business into 140 investments spanning fields from agriculture to sports, and plans to expand its workforce to 450 employees; in addition, Tether's gold reserves have exceeded $23 billion.
In November last year, Justin Sun acquired two small hydropower stations in Norway through his family office, SunFund Energy, with a total installed capacity of 86 MW and an annual power generation of about 350 GWh, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 40,000 European households. In the era of AI exploration, Justin Sun, who has always been bold in thinking and action, chose to hold the "electricity ticket" to board this train of the times.
Regardless of the investment outcomes, cryptocurrencies have become more widely known through various forms such as payment currencies, figures, and asset categories in news media. Perhaps, this is also an indispensable part of the process of cryptocurrencies becoming mainstream.
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