Early this morning, I saw a tweet from Kukuh Laksana announcing the sale of Meta.so for $149,000:
Meta•so sells for $149,000 @hypernames Congrats Nikul!🤯 #dotso https://t.co/GYADjkfAso
— Kukuh Laksana (@kwkuh) October 5, 2021
The seller of Meta.so, Nikul Sanghvi, confirmed the sale in a subsequent tweet. Nikul also provided additional information about the sale, including that it was sold via Dan.com using the buy it now purchase option:
Thank you Kukuh, I got very lucky – that’s the biggest BIN I’ve had by a long long way. Shout out to the @Undeveloped team – their landing pages and buy-side processes are unparalleled 🙏
— Nikul Sanghvi (@hypernames) October 5, 2021
Meta.so was registered on April 5th of this year, making the domain name just six months old. The domain name is registered under Whois privacy at Namecheap, so it is unclear if it has already transferred to the buyer. Because Nikul was informed that the domain name was sold, I believe that means that Dan.com already processed the buyer’s payment so the deal should be done once the ownership change occurs.
The .so extension is the ccTLD for the country of Somalia. According to NameBio, this is the largest sale of a .SO domain name (thanks, Leanne). Importantly, the SLD is the keyword “meta,” which has seen several solid sales this year. In fact, the sale of Meta.so is the second six figure Meta ccTLD sale of 2021, sitting comfortably ahead of the $100,000 sale of Meta.io. There are quite a few nice sales of “meta” and “metaverse” domain names that transacted this year, according to NameBio. Once indexed by DNJournal, it will be the fifth largest ccTLD sale of 2021 and will rank in the top 100 domain name sales of the year (to date).
Congratulations to Nikul on an exceptional sale.
Seems like a fake sale. Why would anyone price a random .so domain at 149K, and most importantly, why would anyone buy such a domain for 149K? Elliot, you wrote an article about this sale and you didn’t even wonder?!
No, I didn’t think about that at all.
Who would have faked the sale and why? A bunch of meta names have sold recently.
Well, obviously those who want to make money on .so, so potentially this TLD investors and the registry. I’m just wondering. Till yesterday the highest .so sale was 5.5K. So I repeat my question, why would anyone price and why would anyone buy this domain for 149K? Why would the buyer not even try to negotiate?
We’ll see how this domain is being developed, I’ll be watching closely.
I have no idea why someone would buy it or how it would be used. The same thing can be said about a whole bunch of my sales that I don’t report. Sometimes I privately express the same “what the heck” wonder when I sell names I don’t report publicly.
Maybe someone sees a unicorn like Notion ($2 billion valuation operating on Notion.so) and thinks they can do the same with this one. I have no idea.
Based on the fact that I trust Nikul and the fact that Dan.com “liked” my tweet about the sale being done via its platform, I have no reason to believe it is not real or faked.
I guess you can see what happens with this name.
Elliot, I also think this sale actually happened, I’m only wondering if it’s real or manufactured (like partner to partner). But I’m not accusing anyone, just this sale seems so unrealistic to me I’m just expressing my confusion. But you’re right, there have been some unrealistic sales in the past.
I hope you also issue a public apology to Nikul (under your own name if you have the balls) for suggesting he faked a sale once you have your evidence that this was legitimate transaction. Once you see who the buyer is you’ll know.
You cannot get more honest, nice and helpful than Nikul.
I’m not sure why people jump to say fake.
Also I sold meta.nyc last week – also via Dan – believe it or not!
I agree with you about Nikul. I have no doubts the sale is legitimate.
Matt, it’s totally reasonable that meta.nyc or meta.so would sell. Not for 149K though.
Yep – I wish I sold meta.nyc for 100k+
.NYC has a long way to go, but maybe one day 🙂
time will tell if this is real or fake. it sounds a bit far fetched but we could be wrong.
I reached out to Reza to ask if he can confirm the sale. I am not sure if he will be able to do so, but I asked. I know some companies will not confirm sale prices and some will.
This one is interesting…
What did I say…..just go to “BullS”— I don’t trust anything on the internet until I see it for myself!!
A lot of meta.tld’s are owned by Facebook, com, org, ai… maybe they bought it. They got the money. not tough to figure it out.
Bingo!