$12M for https://t.co/SXh3lrQkEi
$70M for https://t.co/wmKtlNknzPAlso acquired https://t.co/YZjjqXdOe3
What a legend. https://t.co/avaB4Zw6jy
— Domain (@domain) February 11, 2026
The $70 million buyer of AI.com was Kris Marszalek, Founder of Crypto.com. Following the news of the record-breaking domain name acquisition and its Super Bowl commercial, Marszalek has been spending time discussing the AI.com acquisition and his plans for AI.com.
James Booth reposted a video interview that was conducted by TBPN. In it, Marszalek was asked what he spent to acquire the Crypto.com domain name. Marszalek disclosed that Crypto.com cost $12 million to acquire. It was, reportedly about 1/3 of the company’s capital. Marszalek noted the acquisition also made in the middle of the 2018 cryptocurrency “bear market.”
In 2018, TechCrunch reported on the sale of the Crypto.com domain name without the acquisition price. At that time, Crypto.com was known as Monaco, until the company announced its rebrand shortly after the Crypto.com acquisition.
I added the $12 million sale of Crypto.com to the list of recent one word .com domain name sales. Once the sale is indexed by NameBio, it will rank in the top 10 publicly reported domain name sales of all time. When it is indexed by DNJournal, it will rank as the largest publicly reported domain name sale for 2018, easily surpassing the $3.5 million sale of Ice.com.
$12 million was what people were saying when it sold, so it would seem the figure was leaked already then.
NOTE WELL: Even AFTER Crypto.com sold for what was reportedly $12 million, Estibot was STILL “appraising” it (right – “Sure, Jan”) at only $48,000. For quite a long time. I haven’t checked in a while what they are saying lately.
SOMEONE SHOULD CHECK in case they haven’t had time to scramble and give a reasonable figure instead of what they did for so long, in case they never “revised” that. I would myself but they may be blocking VPN as they have before.
I did try later. They are apparently blocking VPN.
But wait – there’s more!
When I reached the page, now you can’t even use it unless you log in to something. Never used to be that way. They’d let you do some without any such requirement, I think it may have been 2 or 3 max before.
As the saying goes of course – “Shocked, shocked.”
Someone tell David Castello about this. 😉