FTX is a leading cryptocurrency exchange that owns FTX.com but operates in the US on FTX.us. The Economist published an article about FTX Founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. The article mentioned that Bankman-Fried is “widely known as SBF.”

It appears that Bankman-Fried recently acquired the SBF.com domain name. If you visit SBF.com, you are forwarded to FTX.com/foundation and then land on the FTXFoundation.org website. Whois records for SBF.com show the domain name is currently registered to Domains By Proxy, LLC, GoDaddy’s Whois privacy proxy service.

Companies that own domain names and operate websites on sub-optimal domain extensions are often the most likely candidate to purchase the better domain name when they can afford it. Squadhelp CEO Darpan Munjal shared a new feature offered by his platform to help make sellers aware of similar developed domain names:

Knowing when other TLDs for your domains have been registered = Good

Knowing when other TLDs for your domains have actually been developed = Even Better

We will now proactively start notifying sellers when someone develops a website for their domain in a different extension

— Darpan (@darpanmunjal) June 30, 2022

According to its founder, Testimonial, is “a platform that helps businesses collect, manage and distribute testimonials in a single place.” The company has used the Testimonial.to domain name for its website. According to Testimonial founder Damon Chen, the company just acquired Testimonial.io for $35,000 via SquadHelp:

I spent $35,000 on a domain. Here is why 👇https://t.co/rBh9N31RT7

— Damon Chen (@damengchen) June 24, 2022

In the tweet, Damon linked to a blog post he published on the Medium platform with insight about his domain name acquisition. I’ve heard of many different reasons for a domain name acquisition, but this one was fairly unique.

At the time of publication, Testimonial.io still resolves to a SquadHelp landing page. Based on the Whois record, it does not appear that the domain name has transferred yet.

Once the $35,000 sale of Testimonial.io is archived by NameBio, it will rank in the top 50 public .io domain name sales of all time.

Thanks to Jag for calling out this tweet and blog post.

A few weeks ago, I received a $500k opening offer for one of my one word .com domain names via Dan.com. This was a strong offer well above the $100k minimum offer I had set for this unpriced domain name. I declined the offer and tried to negotiate a deal, but unfortunately a deal was not reached.

When I received the offer, my first thought was the offer wasn’t genuine. Even though someone needs to confirm the offer by entering a verification code sent by Dan.com via email, I felt that it wasn’t legit. Put simply, in my experience, nearly all opening offers I have received have been pretty close to the minimum offer amount. People, myself included, tend to try and find the minimum offer and work from there.

The Chill.com domain name is used by a company called Chill Brands that sells CBD-infused products. Chill.com was reportedly acquired by the company for $1.6 million. The deal involved two payment installments of $800,000 so it could not be recorded as a sale until the final installment was made.

The final payment was made, according to a press release that was shared by George Kirikos: