An article by Tanaya Macheel on Cheddar has pegged the sale price of the Crypto.com domain name at $12 million. According to the article, “Monaco, a Swiss payments and cryptocurrency platform start-up, paid $12 million for the URL as part of a rebranding strategy, Cheddar has learned.” I am not sure whether or not this has been confirmed by the buyer or seller.

If the sale price was $12 million, it would easily be the largest domain name sale of the year, well ahead of the $1.2 million sale of Super.com, as charted by DNJournal. The sale of Crypto.com would also rank as the 9th largest public domain name sale of all time, according to GoDaddy. A $12 million sale would rank below the $13 million sale of Sex.com and above the $11 million sale of Hotels.com.

Interestingly, although

I was chatting with a friend at The Domain Conference, and I congratulated him on a deal that I recently read about. Coyly, he told me that I shouldn’t believe all that I read. After chatting with him for a couple of minutes about it, I think I understood what he meant, although he wouldn’t share any details with me!

The vast majority of domain name sales are all cash. In some instances, in addition to a cash component, a company may give the domain seller additional compensation. Some types of compensation that I can think of off the top of my head include shares in the company, an earn out opportunity (% of sales for example), or some type of stock options. I am sure there are other types of compensation I am not thinking about.

Domain sales platforms and brokers that report transacted sales tend to only

In March of last year, Mike Berkens reported on the sale of Ice.com, although he did not mention the sale price. According to an article in TechCrunch about the new company operating on Ice.com, the domain name was sold for $3 million.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the TechCrunch article about the price of the domain name:

According to a SEC filing shared with me and highlighted by George Kirikos, the JD.com domain name may have been acquired for around $5 million US Dollars in 2012. JD.com is one of the largest Chinese online retailers, and the company is in the midst of prepping for a very large initial public offering.

George Kirikos shared the following information about why he believes the JD.com domain name may have been acquired by the company, which is also known as Jingdong Mall but is now JD.com, Inc.

According to Kirikos:

“I was browsing through EDGAR,