Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010)
Last weekend, in addition to the "Bithumb Airdrops 620,000 BTC" misunderstanding incident, another breakout news sparked heated discussions: top-level domain names ai.com The mysterious buyer behind it has finally come to light. Surprisingly to many, the buyer did not come from an AI giant, but from a cryptocurrency exchange. Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek.
The $70 million transaction, 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 acquired ai.com, and thenThe messageProven to be fake news, yet the domain's listed selling price of 11 million US dollars in 2021 is still astonishing.
August 2023, ai.com The domain name's pointing address has been changed to Musk's AI company xAI.This matter has once again drawn 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 a historically old 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 "hold out for a price."
Until it reappeared in the public eye, it was recently exposed"Price up to 70 million USD"the 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 publicly so far; the transaction was facilitated by domain broker Larry Fischer.The payment method is cryptocurrency.As a reference, this sky-high price is twice the previous sale price of the premium domain voice.com.
As a well-established cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2016, Crypto.com has always been renowned in the industry for its "massive marketing efforts," having previously promoted itself through sports sponsorships and celebrity endorsements; in 2021, it even spent a staggering $700 million 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 exchanges, and this time we will also 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."
Fumbled "Product Launch": ai.com went offline for a period of time within less than 48 hours of its launch
Crypto.com Co-founder and CEO Kris MarszalekPost a message to expressAfter purchasing the domain name, they have been quietly Buidl and will launch their product during the Super Bowl game on Sunday (February 8). Subsequently, they stated that with the AI Agent on the ai.com platform, users will soon be able to deploy their own agents to perform a series of actions on their behalf, such as stock trading, automating workflows, using calendars for scheduling, and executing 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 Post a message to express, "This 70 million dollar domain, after running 8 million dollars worth of ads (Odaily Planet Daily note: the general price of a Super Bowl ad) went down with a 504 error."
You have to admit, this incident once again proves that 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.
Sun Yuchen paid a million dollars to have lunch with Warren Buffett. Recently, the operations of cryptocurrency bigwigs have been even more diverse:
Aave founder Stani Kulechov in London's Notting Hill area last NovemberBought a mansion worth 22 million pounds (about 30 million US dollars).
Tether CEO Paolo is more focused on "not putting all eggs in one basket," havingReliable informationsaid that Tether has invested the profits from its stablecoin business into 140 investments spanning fields from agriculture to sports, and plans to expand its staff size to 450 people; in addition, Tether'sThe scale of gold reserves has exceeded 23 billion U.S. dollars..
In November last year, through his family office SunFund Energy, Sun Yuchen acquired two small hydropower stations in Norway in one go, 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, Sun Yuchen, who has always dared to think and act boldly, has chosen 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.