In January of 2012, Escrow.com announced that the company had surpassed $1 billion in transactions. Just a little over a year later, and the company has closed an additional half a billion in total transactions. From my perspective, the growth rate is as impressive as the total transaction volume.

According to a press release this morning, “Escrow.com is pleased to announce that they have surpassed $1.5 Billion in secured settled transactions and continues to establish itself as the leading provider of secure business and transaction management on the Internet.”

Since Escrow.com is the preferred escrow service of Ebay, Cars.com, and other companies, I don’t know what percentage of this huge dollar amount is domain sales. I would guess it’s a considerable amount considering the widespread usage of the company’s services across the domain industry.

Congratulations to the team at Escrow.com, and as always, I appreciate the company’s sponsorship of my blog.

Here’s the press release announcing the news:

Mike Mann is the founder of Buy Domains, Domain Market, and a number of other Internet companies such as SEO.com and Phone.com (three of his companies made the 2012 Inc 500 list). He also happens to be a polarizing individual, and some people have strong opinions of him.

If you don’t follow his Facebook account, you can see evidence of this by the number of Fake Mike Mann and/or Mike Mann parody Twitter accounts that have been created.  Here are just a few of them that I found this morning:

There are a few people in the domain industry that seem to get lots of good publicity, and Mike Mann is one of those people. This week, Forbes ran an article about Mann’s Cashless.com startup, and it’s well worth a read.

At the moment, the business has not yet launched, and the domain name is parked at Smartname. However, a major fundraising effort is under way, and Mann hopes to begin staffing the company soon.

According to the article, Mann “intends to raise $1 million in seed funding over the next three months” from friends and family. The company will launch in south Florida as a testing bed, and should it prove to be a hit, the expectation is that it will expand and further fund raising efforts will be made beyond friends and family.

Knowing Mann’s deep connections from within the domain industry, should Cashless.com be a big hit, there may be a lot of money flowing back into the domain space. Based on Mann’s track record, I wouldn’t bet against him. I don’t think the guy sleeps, and if he does, it’s next to his computer.

This will be a company to follow.

Thanks to TNT for originally sharing the article.

Dutch Boyd is more well known for being a professional poker player, but he’s also a domain name investor who has been active on NamePros and DNForum. I saw that he recently put one of his poker tournament prizes up for sale on Ebay.

According to the listing:

“Up for sale is this Men’s Bellagio Gold Poker Tournament Bracelet. It’s 14k gold, made in Italy, weighs in at 83 grams and just over 2.6 troy oz. I won this bracelet from a Bellagio NL Holdem poker tournament in 2008. I don’t believe the Bellagio awards gold bracelets for their tournaments any more, so these aren’t being made again. It’s a nice looking bracelet, but I’ve never worn it. So I’m selling it to raise some Christmas cash.”

I know next to nothing about poker, but I think it would be cool to own a little piece of poker history. According to Wikipedia, Boyd’s “total live tournament winnings exceed $1,900,000.” There are plenty of domain investors who haven’t made that much money from their domain investments.

Anyway, if you are interested in buying Boyd’s  Bellagio poker tournament bracelet, the auction ends in a little less than two days. The high bid is $2,400 and there is not a reserve price on this auction.