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Taku Launched by GMO Led by Industry Veterans

This afternoon, I learned about the launch of a new registrar and marketplace brand called Taku – using Taku.com. The brand was launched by GMO Internet Group, a company that is traded publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which operates other brands that primarily operate in Asia.

The thing that caught my attention with this launch is the numerous industry veterans that have been hired in advance of the launch. Christian Voss, Claus Barche, Birgit Berger, Frank Michlick and Michael Piotrowski have spent years working in various roles at well-known domain industry companies.

GX.com Sold for $1.2m via Sedo

The second 7 figure publicly reported domain name sale of 2025 was shared by Sedo in a post on X this morning. GX.com was sold on the platform for $1,200,000 USD in a “Buy Now” deal. Because embedding X posts seems to be broken at the moment, a screenshot of the post is below:

Once this sale is recorded by DNJournal and NameBio, it will become the second largest sale of the year following the $2.2 million sale of Commerce.com. This sale matches Teleperformance’s $1.2 million acquisition of TP.com, which was reported last year. It will rank in the top 5 publicly reported two letter .com (LL.com) domain name sales in the last 5 years.

Notably, Sedo reported the sale of Double.com for $980,000.

GX.com has been registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy – and it is still registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy. The buyer and seller are not publicly known as of yet. There’s a pretty blank “index” page on the GX.com lander, so perhaps we will soon know how it is going to be used.

Not Chasing the Longtail of .AI

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The aftermarket for .AI domain names has grown tremendously over the last several years. A look at Namebio shows the growing annual dollar volume of sales that were publicly reported in the aftermarket.

  • 2018: $420.8k
  • 2019: $1.1m
  • 2020: $1.1m
  • 2021: $1.2m
  • 2022: $878.7k
  • 2023: $5.6m
  • 2024: $11.7m
  • 2025 YTD: $3.2m (my guess is $20m+ for the year)

These aftermarket sales figures do not take into account the number of domain names that have been hand registered by buyers for the registration fee. The .AI registry requires a 2 year registration, and the cost is approaching $100/year. By all accounts, the number of .AI registrations is also growing at a considerable rate.

Namecheap CEO Highlights Success of .AI Expiry Auctions

Namecheap was recently named expiry auction partner for .AI domain names. The first batch of expired .AI auctions concluded last week, and hundreds of .AI domain names were sold. Namebio shows 695 .AI sales on Namecheap worth nearly $800,000 in the last month, although I can’t filter down to specifically include the expiry auctions.

One of the things people noticed was the number of seemingly new bidders who participated in the auctions. The Namecheap Market platform has a pop-up indicating the activity level of each bidder. Visitors can hover over the badge next to each bidder nickname, and a popup highlights the bidder’s activity, along with their join date.

A general concern some people may have is that new bidders could be more likely to be non-paying bidders. Obviously, bidders who can’t/won’t pay could unfairly increase the final price for other participants. Whether these bidders would theoretically join to cause problems or simply have payment processing issues on the platform, non-paying bidders can increase the cost of domain names for genuine bidders.

How Chat.com Helped Me Make ~$800

I have a $20/month paid account at OpenAi. I primarily use it to access ChatGPT – and I always use Chat.com to navigate to the website. One of the ways I use the platform is to generate keyword lists that I use to search for and register domain names.

Oftentimes, these keyword lists revolve around a specific topic, and I will append the lists to a different keyword. For instance, and this is just a made up example based on a current “hot” trend, I might ask Chat.com to generate a list of 100 popular scientific keywords that an 8th grader would know and then append AI.com to the end. I always give an example, such as MeteorAI.com in this case, so the tool can understand exactly what I am seeking.

Todd Han Shares Dynadot Growth Chart

Dynadot is a domain registrar that is a preferred choice for numerous domain investors. I have been using Dynadot’s aftermarket and now have nearly three dozen non-.com domain names registered there. The Dynadot registrar platform is very fast, and it offers investor-focused features in an easy to use user interface. The registrar is now home to a reported 6 million domain names, and the company employs 150 people.

Todd Han, CEO of Dynadot, shared a chart showing the growth of the company since its founding in 2002:

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