Matt Blaze Comments About Crypto.com Sale

Matt Blaze owned Crypto.com for many years. In March, he reportedly told The Verge that the Crypto.com domain name was not for sale. Whether Blaze fully intended to keep the domain name or was stating that as a negotiating tactic, Crypto.com was sold to a company called Monaco, which quickly rebranded as Crypto.com.

When news of the deal broke, I do not believe Blaze offered a comment about selling the domain name. In a blog post published on MattBlaze.org, Blaze offered some commentary about why he sold Crypto.com. The full blog post is worth a read, but here is an excerpt that discusses why Blaze ultimately decided to sell the domain name:

ā€œOver the last few years, I’ve gotten an increasing barrage of offers, many of which were obviously non-serious, but a few of which were, frankly, attention-getting, for the crypto.com domain. I shrugged most of them off, but it became increasingly clear that holding on to the domain was making less and less sense for me. I quietly entered discussion with a few serious potential buyers earlier this year.

Last month, I reached an agreement to sell the domain. I have no idea what the new owner plans to use it for beyond what I read in the trade press, and I have no financial stake in their business. The details will have to stay confidential, but I will say that I’m satisfied with the outcome and that it involved neither tulips nor international postal reply coupons.ā€

When I wrote about the sale of Crypto.com, I speculated that the seller received some equity in the deal. Based on the excerpt above, it appears that my speculation was incorrect.

It remains to be seen how much Crypto.com sold for, but I assume it was a lot of money. Perhaps some day the company will file to go public and reveal the purchase price in public disclosures.

Thank you to Darryl Lopes for sharing Matt Blazeā€™s blog post with me.

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

36 COMMENTS

  1. Makes sense IMO. Blaze was never a fan of the new crypto craze or ICO’s in general. In fact he was very critical about the term being used in that new connection. My guess is, it sold for more than sex.com ($13m).

  2. Wow, no financial stake and no idea what the buyer plans are for the domain??
    Guess it really was only about the money after all, Matt.

    My guess is that Crypto.com domain sold between $15-20 Million. Probably closer to $15 million.

  3. More interesting is that Matt Blaze, on his blog home page also wrote the following: “Warning: Many cryptocurrencies are scams, and I strongly advise against their use as investment vehicles.”
    Congrats for the sale, and obviously I totally agree with his warning. šŸ™‚

  4. I personally believe there were not more than 5 serious offers above $1MM mark. Your hype or wish to see any domain name being sold for $15-$20MM has no realistic grounds. Even I wish Matt to earn that money (why not?), I strongly believe the transaction was not higher than $3.5MM. Domaining is dying, so it was certainly a good decision to sell it. Matt’s retirement should be much nicer now. I wish him and his wife a good health to enjoy his money wisely.

  5. I wouldn’t be surprised if the domain name sold for $1-5 million. Likely, anything more than a $500,000 would have been considered a serious offer. He took no equity, which many domain speculators initially believed. Maybe the company that bought the domain name could be convinced to disclose the price so it can be charted on DN Journal before the end of the year or some one will find the price in an SEC filing…

    • I know 2 people from the industry (domainer) who offered low 7 figures each. (less than $2 million).
      I teamed up with 2 other investors last year to make a bid of $1 million (at that time Bitcoin was trading around $3,000. Never got any answer.

      We are all resellers.. Now imagine what crypto companies offered that raised between $100-200 millions and have hard caps in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

    • Thanks for clarifying the price range floor. Congrats to Professor Blaze, based on what you are sharing $5 million is a real possibility. Maybe he will take the profits and create IT startup since that is his field of expertise? Maybe someone will convince the buyer to disclose the price.

  6. Andrew Rosener said he knows of someone that offered $10mm cash and got turned down, so why would you guys think the sale price was less than $10mm? That wouldnā€™t make much sense would it.

    • They have raised $26million so these comments are very unrealistic. Think about what a company that has raised $26million would normally spend on a domain. Typically even $1million would be a massive investment for such company (and potentially not seen in good light by investors).

    • Andrew Rosener is a PR and show-off person. He is doing his business way different way than what he presents. Andrew buys for 5-10 times less for what he is selling. But he cannot tell you that, because then he would be pushed to sell cheaper. He is successful thanks to people like you, who believe anything that is written or said on blogs. Every broker’s interest is to push price up, if not in reality, then at least in your minds. He is a pro in this field. You are the exactly the opposite of his success. Andrew is not stupid and buying crypto.com for $10MM would be extremely dumb.

    • Will, so you’re basically calling Andrew a liar and a massive exaggerator?

      Looks like you don’t know what you’re talking about and that the joke’s on you because a source just came out and said crypto.com sold for $12MM (hasn’t been confirmed yet though).

  7. A few comments,

    -When it comes to individuals selling the actual price is often far less than “the industry” predicts. e.g. purple.com
    -The seller looked very motivated in the article a few months ago to get a sale done.
    -It’s unlikely anyone was seriously offer $10million cash and then started spreading the news around when they “heard nothing back”.
    -Crypto is on the skids, bitcoin down 70%, would have been a huge factor in price.

    • The last is exactly the reason it should be even more valuable right now. A year ago one could have started anything crypto and profit, even with name like dsadasfafafcoin, now the hype is gone and only few projects seem to have established as recognizable brands for the general crowd. So, everything beside these few would understand the necessity to rebrand, how to you stand out of these hundreds nameless crypto projects, tell the audience you are not scam? Get a cool simple name everyone knows already.

      I think the sale could be even higher than other people suggested here. It is simply worth it.

    • Price crash? So bitcoin is $1 now? Oh wait, its stable at being several times more expensive than last summer. Wish the domain industry crashed as much.

  8. I have a hunch the price was far less than it *should* have been and was worth. Hate to say it but I would be surprised if it was more than $5m, and not surprised if it was a lot less. People affiliated with “Penn” also sometimes appear to be suffering from a severe case of what I call “Penn-itis,” which would mean he could have made a bad deal and believe he did really well and knew what he was doing. I’ll bet my friend John Berryhill can agree about the existence of “Penn-itis.” šŸ™‚

  9. Congratulations to the buyer and seller. We should all be happy for both.

    Okay, I’m just going to say this, and I say this with love and the perspective of an old lady with a lot of c-suite experience the last forty decades, and I say this outside of this specific conversation:

    When we have a good sale in the “industry” let’s think about what our public response should be. A consideration of forward-facing comments could go a long way to leveraging the message of how domains can literally transform a business, and it’s visibility in their markets. Oneupmanship to make cases for superiority in analysis, or for low valuations, or pan someone for their imagined business practices, isn’t a public conversation.

    Our “industry” has suffered because of 1) valuations based on a price someone else is willing to sell their domains (valuations based on previous sales, which in many respects, reflects how much someone is willing to sell their domain based on circumstances that may have nothing to do with actual value) rather than actual impact domain names can have to a business in their respective markets, and 2) because of the back and forth trying to prove someone overpaid, and various other forms of public whinging and myopic valuations that have nothing to do with true market impact of those domains.

    I firmly believe that decline in domain pricing is because of strategic missteps of vocal people who think like flippers instead of CEOs trying to solve real market problems in their industries. None of this is a specific reference to this conversation. I’ve noticed it, in general, over the years, and many times have drafted a comment of this nature and then blown it away without sending it, because I don’t have time or patience for a backlash of negativity. But let me just say, let’s take it to a higher plain, and think strategically. Domains in my experience are largely underpriced, even with the move to mobile, and other trends we can all see. I believe that this underpricing is because of US and us alone, not because of actual impact and value in a market, and I think we can all do better in our forward-facing thinking and conversations about good domains creating leverage in a market.

    Carry on, and Cheers. Wishing you all great sales. If I ever get one I can talk about, I will, but I can tell you I have sold many domains at xxx,xxx% over acquisition pricing and “appraisals” because I think about customers and reach within markets, cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value of a new customer gained, and other marketing factors by which CEOs and CMOs are challenged. I would encourage all of us to do so, and get away from the lowest common denominator of what someone else was willing to sell their domain, amid their own life circumstances that might have zero to do with true value in the marketplace to an acquiring company. That is not the bellwether of value. Strategic leverage into greater visibility in a highly competitive market is what domain names provide, and valuations of a domain should be based on those market factors alone. We have shot ourselves in the foot as an “industry” by valuating domains any other way.

    Tasha Kidd
    broker@corporationdomains.com

  10. Congrats to the seller and the buyer, the only thing – I wish he sold to a company that actually has a working product and not just promises. Monaco has a long history of not delivering what they claim they would – their debit card has never seen the light yet.

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