Largest ICO Uses a New gTLD Domain Name

To date, the largest ICO (initial coin offering) in terms of funding raised is a company that operates on a new gTLD domain name. A company called Block.One, which utilizes a .One domain name, raised over $4 billion in its ICO, according to an article in CNBC:

The $4 billion that was raised outpaces every stock exchange IPO (initial public offering) and other ICOs.

The Block.One domain name was created in August of 2016. Using DomainTools, I can see that the domain name was initially registered by Andrew Bliss, the CFO at Block.One. The domain name was later registered under privacy proxy.

I am not sure who owns the matching BlockOne.com domain name as it is registered under Whois privacy proxy and the domain name does not seem to resolve. Interestingly, both Block.One and BlockOne.com have Amazon (awsdns) nameservers, but the actual nameservers are different. This could be coincidental. It would be smart if the company acquired the matching BlockOne.com domain name, but it is a bit peculiar that the domain name is not resolving or forwarding if the company was able to secure it.

One thing you will note is that the branding is Block.One rather than Block or Block One. This should be helpful in ensuring people understand that Block.One is the brand and url.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

10 COMMENTS

  1. I like this gTld, I made several sales !
    It has just one problem: the registry behind this gtld is not promoting it :-S

  2. I think there is a good chance they own the .com as well. At some point between March and June 2017 the domain went from being at Uniregistry to Amazon registrar.

  3. $4 bln to a company like Block One is Fools’ Money at its worst …
    I would not invest a cent in it, and yes, I know who they are and what they do.
    The vast majority of ICOs are just plain SCAMS, unregulated money grabs and waste of (other people) money …
    Guess why they use ICOs instead of going through regulated channels …
    I mean, there is a reason why it’s called fools money … lol 🙂

    • I don’t want to defend a company like Bock.one but there are legitimate reasons for companies and startups to do an ICO instead of going the “traditional” way of VC’s, private equity and others.
      One good example for a great ICO is the new browser “Brave” from the former Mozilla CEO
      https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/?guccounter=1

      The point is, there are scammers that do ICO’s and there are scammers who scam VC’s and private investors.
      90% of all VC funded companies ultimately fail. ICO funded companies will certainly have the same rate of failure, maybe even higher. The world is not black an white.

    • Back in the 90s there was the “Wolf of Wall-Street” pump and dump schemes; now they call them ICOs!
      Putting your hard earned TAXED dollars into unregulated ICO funds somewhere in the Cayman Islands sounds really smart. 🙂
      I would love to see their books and tax bill.

      It gets worse, the gTDL name they picked is terrible. With $4Billions raised they at least could “BUY” some credibility with a quality .com name.

      JUST WOW! Goes to show you that ANYTHING is POSSIBLE!

    • “there are scammers that do ICO’s and there are scammers who scam VC’s and private investors.”
      Of course there are also many who scam VCs (just see the Theranos case as a random example), private equity, but in that case you are scamming professional investors (institutional investors), you are not soliciting investments from the general public (private investors), which is a totally different thing.
      I think you are totally missing the point, the key issue here, the difference between institutional investors and private (retail) investors.
      I see you don’t have much experience in the financial industry, otherwise you would know that professional investors have specific investment skills and take their own risks, while the general public has to be protected by authorities.
      That’s why securities (or similar financial instruments) sales/offerings to the public are prohibited by law unless you are authorized by the SEC (or equivalent authority in other countries), which put your company under scrutiny.
      Personally I think ICOs should be banned, because they are a flagrant violation of securities laws, and I’m not the only one who thinks so: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/business/initial-coin-offering-critic.html
      If the SEC or other authorities decide to allow ICOs without a proper regulation they become accomplice of scammers, and they should be prosecuted by law. If you lose your money, blame the lack of regulation, besides yourself.
      Too much deregulation means the wild west, scammers paradise, not only in the financial industry …

    • And crypto/ICOs bubble is far worse than the 1999-2000 Internet bubble.
      When (soon) it blows up there will be a bloodbath of epic proportion …

    • Jesus Christ, Andrea, really?? This again? By now we all know that at some time in the past you were an incredible equity analyst hotshot for some mid level European retail bank, I get that. But dude, you really need to let that shit go… It’s getting weird. So let me tell you something. Around ’99 when everybody was really enjoying the bubble, I was a very young trainee for a fairly large Swiss bank that was just created out of a merger the year before. You know who fueled that epic rally up to a point of no return? The retail investor. These guys don’t want your protection. They bought EVERY single IPO that we presented them. We would warn them, they would buy anyway. They bought Lycos, T-Online, Infineon, EM.TV all the shitty European IPO’s that you can dream of. You know who had a buy rating on ALL these shitty stocks and IPO’s? You guessed right. The wannabe smart equity “analysts”. They had them all on conviction buy. They couldn’t get enough of it. And I am not talking about some unregulated OTC market here, Andrea. I am talking Nemax listings, fully regulated, fully audited, and full of bullshit. The stock market didn’t protect shit back in the days. They let those poor retail assholes DIE a cruel death, I can promise you that. The team I worked for liquidated dozens of accounts on a daily between the winter of ’99 and summer of 2002. I know I know, Andrea you were better, you probably saw it all coming and had all these IPO’s rated conviction sell. But you probably worked for Intesa or Monte dei Paschi and no one gave a shit, right? So the retail fools are back again. You want to protect them, but they don’t want your protection. They want their share, they want to gamble, they want IN and they want to party like it’s 1999. And you know what, when it’s all set and done, when the music stops, when it all blows up again, and when the dust settles and master analyst Andrea Paladini and his jury of white knights comes up with the verdict.. You probably will be right and a lot of people will have lost a lot of money while others won’t have to work another day in their life. But until then, let them boys play! 🙂

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