Did Square Acquire Square.com?

Square.com now forwarding to SquareUp.com, home of Square

In December of 2009, I wrote an article about how Twitter founder Jack Dorsey  launched a mobile payment service called Square, although the company was resigned to using  SquareUp.com for its website. In the last year, Square has grown in popularity, and I’ve seen a number of merchants using it to process credit card payments.

At the time of the launch, I wondered aloud why “someone with the capital resources such as Dorsey would launch a new brand on a domain name that is different from the actual brand.” Of course, the logical domain name for a company called Square would be Square.com, especially with trust being such an important factor when considering the importance of credit card processing.

I just received a tip that Square.com is now forwarding to SquareUp.com, although the Whois record still shows SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS CO., LTD. as the registrant, which is unchanged in the last several years. This could possibly indicate a potential sale of the domain name, it could be that the company is leasing Square.com or paying for forwarding, or the registrant could simply be doing something nice to help the startup. Realistically, it could be any one of these things or possibly something I didn’t even think about.

One change I noticed is that the registrar status is listed as “Ok” instead of locked or transfer/delete prohibited, which may possibly indicate a transfer is in the works. Since the domain name transferred from Network Solutions to a registrar doing business as Onamae  sometime recently, it could simply be that the domain name was never re-locked.

I reached out to both parties to seek an answer and will update this if I hear back from either. If you have more information about this, please post it in the comment section.

Thanks to Bill Sweetman of YummyNames.com for the tip.

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

4 COMMENTS

  1. If you had digged deeper, you will find that I was the one that knew it all along as I received many offers on squarely.com which I own.

    Square was owned by a Jap company.

  2. Square Enix is a public company in Japan (quite a large one at that, in the gaming area; their market cap is over USD $1 billion (market cap in Google Finance is in Yen). Assuming it was a big sale, it should be disclosed in their financials. I’d guess at least $5 million, maybe even $10 to $15 million.

  3. You should write a new article about this. Square Enix still own this domain name. It seems like Square leases the domain from them. Must be an expensive lease!

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