Last year, leading domain name registrar GoDaddy revealed it facilitated the sale of the Monero.com domain name for the reported price of $316,250, plus a 20% brokerage fee that brought the total paid to over $370,000.
Following the sale, which closed in early 2021, Monero.com had a long period of inactivity. The domain stood dormant for many months, with the buyer remaining unknown.
The value of Monero.com largely originates from cryptocurrency, where the moniker Monero was adopted by a popular crypto coin that uses privacy-enhancing technologies to achieve anonymity. Released in 2014, Monero currently trades at around $141 with a market cap of over $2.5 billion.
At the time of the domain sale, it was considered that Monero.com may have been acquired by Monero’s operating team, which exists on GetMonero.org. This is false, though, as the domain’s new owner has now been revealed.
Cake Wallet, an open-source Monero wallet, smartly purchased Monero.com.
Founded in 2018, Cake Wallet was the first open-source iOS Monero wallet. The company expanded to cover Android in 2020, and by 2021 Cake wallet began supporting Bitcoin and Litecoin. According to CoinDesk, Cake Wallet has over 150,000 users.
The company has now deployed a site on Monero.com, advertising its wallet apps plus other information about Cake Wallet. It has also launched social media accounts under the “Monero.com by Cake Wallet” brand.
Acquiring the exact-match .com domain for an entire cryptocurrency coin is a savvy move by Cake Wallet. With Monero central to the company’s product offering, owning Monero.com is only going to attract customers enticed by the inherent trust and prestige of Monero.com.
One thing I can say about metaverse, cryptocurrency and NFT entrepreneurs; they have an inherently more developed understanding of the value of digital assets and URLs.
They are not waiting decades to secure EMD dot-COMs, they are grabbing as soon as they can.
This bodes well for one word dot-Com in 2022.
This reminds me of this story
https://techstartups.com/2018/07/06/highly-sought-domain-name-crypto-com-sold-millions-dollars/
Monaco was a relatively unknown small startup, now they are top 50 crypto currency by mcap. I would say it’s all due Crypto.com domain name. They also bought Crypto.org later.