Domain Industry News

This afternoon, I learned about the launch of a new registrar and marketplace brand called Taku – using Taku.com. The brand was launched by GMO Internet Group, a company that is traded publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which operates other brands that primarily operate in Asia.

The thing that caught my attention with this launch is the numerous industry veterans that have been hired in advance of the launch. Christian Voss, Claus Barche, Birgit Berger, Frank Michlick and Michael Piotrowski have spent years working in various roles at well-known domain industry companies.

Dynadot is a domain registrar that is a preferred choice for numerous domain investors. I have been using Dynadot’s aftermarket and now have nearly three dozen non-.com domain names registered there. The Dynadot registrar platform is very fast, and it offers investor-focused features in an easy to use user interface. The registrar is now home to a reported 6 million domain names, and the company employs 150 people.

Todd Han, CEO of Dynadot, shared a chart showing the growth of the company since its founding in 2002:

Update: After publishing this article, I heard from Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie (Freelancer is the parent company of Escrow.com). Matt told me the information in the article is incorrect, and these countries were added to the “do not service” list in error.

Matt’s full statement to me is here:

“The article is erroneous – we do service those countries listed today.

We updated our compliance processes yesterday and moved a few countries to a higher risk category in the database, which seems to have auto-populated the website for our “do not service” list which is incorrect and we are getting corrected immediately.

To be clear, we continue to support China and Israel.

The only restriction that I am aware of in that list is that there is a total goods embargo BETWEEN the countries of Turkey and Israel currently.”

Escrow.com maintains a list of countries / regions from which it does not support payments. Buyers and sellers in these regions can not receive payments or disburse to bank accounts from these countries. In 2019, Escrow.com made some waves when it added Russia and the US state of Alabama to this list. Since then, the state of Alabama seems to have been removed from this list.

In its most recent update, Escrow.com added 18 countries/regions to its list of countries not supported by Escrow.com. The two countries that stood out the most to me are Israel and China. I know of many domain registrants who live in these two countries, and I also know there are many businesses in these two countries that acquire and use high value domain names.

If you’ve been involved in the domain name investment space for more than a minute, you know – or at least know of – Divyank Turakhia. Div, as well as his brother Bhavin Turakhia, is a billionaire who got his start in the domain space. I am pretty sure he is still involved with the industry. Ron Jackson wrote an article about Div’s background in DNJournal, as did Wired.

With competitive UEFA Champions League matches starting this week, I thought it was neat to learn that Div reportedly became an investor in Atalanta, an historic Italian football club: