Frank Schilling

At the NamesCon live domain name auction in February of 2019, Frank Schilling acquired DomainNames.com for $370,000. The domain name was sold in the auction by Network Solutions, and it has been forwarding to Uniregistry’s website since the purchase was completed.

As you know, GoDaddy acquired Uniregistry and Name Administration from Frank Schilling. After speaking with a company spokesperson, I was able to confirm that GoDaddy has acquired DomainNames.com as a part of the Uniregistry acquisition.

While looking through my DomainTools Registrant Alert email yesterday morning, I noticed domain names from Frank Schilling’s Name Administration Inc. transferred to a company called NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. The domain names are still registered at Uniregistrar Corp. (Uniregistry). I assume GoDaddy created this entity in the wake of its deal to acquire Frank Schilling’s company and the reported 350,000+ domain names in Frank’s portfolio.

GoDaddy has a domain name portfolio holding company called NameFind LLC. As far as I am aware, the bulk of domain names acquired by GoDaddy in various portfolio deals have moved into the NameFind LLC account. The NameFind LLC company has a mailing address in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the same address as Afternic’s office.

NameFind Cayman Islands LTD. has a Whois registrant address in the Cayman Islands:

Since the news about GoDaddy buying Uniregistry broke yesterday, there has been a lot of speculation and discussion about the purchase price. Although the price doesn’t really matter all that much to anyone beyond any Uniregistry stakeholders (like Frank Schilling) and GoDaddy shareholders, of course it is natural for people in the domain space to want to know how much was paid to buy the assets. I would love to know how much value Frank built over the last couple of decades in the business.

GoDaddy announced a major corporate acquisition in a press release this morning. GoDaddy will be acquiring Uniregistry, the company founded and operated by Frank Schilling. Uniregistry operates a Cayman-based domain name registrar and domain name brokerage platform. GoDaddy is also acquiring Name Administration, a related entity, which owns a portfolio of more than 350,000 domain names. GoDaddy is not acquiring Uniregistry’s domain registry, which operates 26 new gTLD extensions.