Domain Guardians Announces Sale of BTC.com for $1 Million

 

You can add another seven figure domain name sale to this year’s domain name sales chart. I just learned that Domain Guardians brokered the sale of the BTC.com domain name for $1 million USD. The buyer is reportedly a Bitcoin mining hardware company called GAWMiners. The domain name registration remains under privacy, and the landing page has not yet changed.

It was just over two months ago that I reported the private acquisition of BTC.com. I reached out to the seller of the domain name for a comment, but I believe the owner would prefer to remain private. Jen Sale, Co-Founder of Domain Guardians did comment on the sale of BTC.com.  “Your domain name is the foundation of your online brand,” said Sale. “Flagship domains like BTC.com solidify brands by empowering users to easily discover, remember, share and recognise your company online. The right domain name can take your brand to new levels.”

According to Domain Guardians, this is the largest public Bitcoin-related domain name sale of all time. BitcoinWallet.com sold for $250k back in February, and the domain name is already being used for a startup in the Bitcoin space. There have been a number of other Bitcoin-related domain name sales in the last several months, and CoinDesk published an article about this market.

Interestingly, it now appears to me that most of the best exact match Bitcoin .com domain names are owned by end user companies.

Congratulations to all of the parties in this deal. It looks like the BTC.com landing page was right… something “amazing” was coming, but I didn’t expect it to be such a quick sale.

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

22 COMMENTS

  1. No doubt I was far from alone, but just want to mention I certainly called it in terms of what it’s easily worth:

    http://domainnamewire.com/2014/07/09/bitcoins-com-gives-heritage-auctions-the-press-it-has-been-looking-for/#comments

    “John says:

    July 11, 2014 at 1:45 am

    Don’t get me wrong – BTC.com is still worth a fortune and also worth seven figures imo. It’s just that “Bitcoin” and “Bitcoins” are better.”

    😉 Congrats to the seller, buyer and anyone else involved. Nice to see this…

  2. Moving into the future though, ‘BTC’ will have more usage than “Bitcoin” or “Bitcoins”…Personally, I believe the new owners had this in mind when they threw done the cash…

    • I’m not aware of any reason why that should be so, Chris, so if you’d care to support your contention there I’m all ears and willing to listen…

    • P.S. Isn’t it more likely that what the buyer(s) really had in mind was simply that both “Bitcoin” and “Bitcoins” were not available now?

    • “as stated,” ay? You’ve got an opening statement in the form of a definite unqualified prediction, followed by a new sentence with a “personally” that only modifies and goes with what you believe the new owners had in mind. Doesn’t get any clearer than that. Personally I would have left out the “as stated” and everything would be fine. But if anyone wants to make an argument in favor of “btc” vs. “bitcoin(s)” based on opinion I’d still be all ears, though I doubt anyone has a compelling or convincing one.

    • Chris, I guess I call that you backpedaling on your weak and unsupportable prediction at my expense by trying to make it look like you didn’t really do what you did in black and white in front of the whole world and like the only problem was with me. Fail.

      🙂

    • Well you can fool some of the people some of the time, including even Elliot now apparently, and yourself all of the time, but you would do well to do some research on “the emperor’s new clothes” and the topic of psychological projection, Chris Campbell, if that’s even your real name. But thanks for the memories with all your public lying, disingenuousness, insult and name calling here in front of the whole world on Elliot’s blog.

  3. I want to quickly apologize to Elliot and his readership. If I am willing to comment even once about an article or another readers comment I should be willing to comment further on my own opinions. So to John and everyone else here is my reasoning for the comment I made above :

    “Moving into the future though, ‘BTC’ will have more usage than “Bitcoin” or “Bitcoins”…Personally, I believe the new owners had this in mind when they threw done the cash…”

    So here goes…

    When any company is carving out it’s identity on the net, they certainly don’t need breakage on traffic meant for them but that has found its way to a similar domain (competitor), especially right from day one. In the case of Bitcoin.com vs. Bitcoins.com, the two domains will be ever battling for eyeballs meant for the other, simply because of the letter ‘S’. It is conceivable that this effect could also end up in a legal battle at some time between the two owners, unless one company foots the bill to own both domains. Additionally, both names may have to defend their brands from a handful of mispells. Confusion ensues. I belive that BTC.com will not experience this problem to that extent.

    Second, in the case of a financial instrument, shorter acronyms are the norm and currencies are usually represented by 3 letters, US Dollar = USD, Euro Member Countries = EUR, United Kingdom Pound = GBP, etc. As Bitcoin continues to look, act and become accepted as a currency instrument, it’s shorter BTC abbreviation will be used more often by banking and financial organizations and thankfully for the new owners, BTC is not currently represented as any other world currency. Yours, mine and every other Bitcoin wallet represents your balance as 0.0 BTC so BTC is already recognized by every wallet holder already. Currently BTC is the goto acronym used on the majority of altcoin exchanges and represented in most trading pairs. As the acronym become more mainstream, this should translate to even more recognition and credibility for the new owners over time.

    This brings up the third point of how BTC.com would have more value in the future than, in my opinion, the other two competing Bitcoin domains. BTC.com may be more secure and be more reliable when building any API platform for a data delivery of pricing information and or exchange trades via web or phone apps. If so, higher security and reliability could then translate to overall cost savings and stronger reputation for the new owners.

    Shorter is not always better if there is a loss of recognition along the way. In this case, as I postulate, the future of BTC.com holds more promise the other two domains. These are my only my personal insights and opinions.

    Chris

    • Really, Elliot, none? LOL. I’m not entirely surprised by you here, however, though I am surprised at how easily dazzled and beguiled you are by just a little long-winded articulateness finally strung together with a sprinkling of choice vocabulary buzz words after the guy was called on the carpet for his public behavior here on your blog. But as I originally stated that I doubt anyone has a compelling or convincing argument, that’s exactly what I find in his epistle there and no real useful or convincing “insight” on the subject at all.

    • Well it does amaze me if people who try to turn their own behavior back on the other guy and make the other guy out to be the one who did what they just did in just a quick and transparent little dose of verbal slickness actually succeed at it.

      As far as the topic goes, though, you might feel you have no skin in this now, but I’ll bet you would nonetheless have loved to be the one who sold “bitcoinwallet.com” for $250K, and be very glad to land a bitcoin-related winner down the road. I’d suggest that as domain investors we all potentially have some skin in the game in the sense of being able to accurately gauge and assess which term has more value, “btc” or “bitcoin(s),” similar, for example, to how the prefix “online*” vs. “internet*” vs. “web*” can mean the difference between a small six to seven figure fortune or just a low to middling “also ran” domain.

  4. Nice work by Mike and the team at Domain Guardians, I have dealt with Mike in the past and he is a highly professional operator. In Australia their is actually a company who deals in bitcoins who trades under the name BTC on the stock exchange so I was surprised they did not show interest, that been said they did just acquire some other bitcoin realted domains. Yet congrats to the new buyers.

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