Recently, GoDaddy announced that it facilitated the sale of Monero.com for $316,250. The deal, which closed in February, saw the domain move from Network Solutions to a privacy protected GoDaddy account.
Previously owned by Mon/ero Construction Co., I assumed that the domain name had been acquired by the team behind the cryptocurrency Monero.
Like most cryptocurrencies, Monero experienced a bull run earlier this year after moving from a low of $35.92 in March 2020 to a high of $483 just over a year later. As of publishing, the coin trades around $266.
Monero, which operates on GetMonero.org, would be the obvious buyer of Monero.com. You might expect the developers of Monero to buy Monero.com and redirect the .com to its current site, or migrate entirely from GetMonero.org to Monero.com.
The domain could be owned by one of the original developers of Monero and since the name is under privacy protection, it’s impossible to tell. However, I was surprised to see that Monero.com now redirects to an Afternic “for sale” landing page, something that it wasn’t doing a couple of weeks ago.
A look on Afternic shows that the domain is listed for sale with a $600,000 price tag and a $390,000 minimum offer.
Typically, a six-figure purchase such as this suggests that the buyer has a plan for the domain name. It seems that whatever the plan was, it hasn’t come to fruition. I’ve submitted information requests to Monero and the owner of Monero.com, but as of yet, I have no information from either party. That means that we’re purely speculating at this stage, but it’s interesting to see that the domain is for sale so soon after a significant purchase.
A previous version of this article noted that Monero.org was the official website for the Monero project. In fact, the correct web address is GetMonero.org.
Wow! That’s an interesting read.
Down now?