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