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Nominations Open for 2027 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award

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Nominations are now open for the 2027 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award, which is presented annually by the Internet Commerce Association (ICA). The award will be presented at the ICA Meeting in Las Vegas this January. This will be the tenth anniversary of the award.

The Lonnie Borck Memorial Award was created in memory of Lonnie Borck, a successful and well-liked member of the domain name investment community who passed away in 2016. Lonnie was also a close friend of mine. According to the ICA, “the Award honors those who make an exceptional contribution to fostering a sense of community within the domain name industry.”

I was fortunate to receive the award last year.

Right of the Dot Holding NamesCon Auction

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Right of the Dot (ROTD) will be holding the domain name auction at the NamesCon conference next month. The live auction will take place on November 11 at 4pm (eastern) at Ice Palace Studios in Miami. Auction bidders will be able to participate in person at the venue or they can place their bidding online.

The auction pre-bidding is now open at bid.rotd.com, and ROTD is continuing to add domain names to the auction inventory. At the moment, there are more than 300 domain names listed for sale. Some of the highlighted domain names include Borrow.com, Fare.com, Beg.com, HomeService.com, Edinburgh.com, and CapeTown.com. I understand that early bidding activity will help ROTD determine which domain names are selected for the live portion of the auction.

Opt In / Out to the Atom.com Black Friday Sale

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Atom.com will be hosting its annual Black Friday sale, which begins on November 16th. Traditionally, Black Friday is the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, which is November 27th this year.

The way this works is that Atom will offer discounts of up to 25% on platform-listed domain names as part of its Black Friday sale. I think this means Atom can offer a discount of any amount maxing out at 25%. Domain sellers don’t choose the domain names or the discount amounts on an individual basis. This is done automatically by Atom.

Lumis Hits $100 Million in Brokered Deals in 2026

Lumis announced a substantial milestone this morning. The company has brokered $100 million + in domain name deals so far in 2026. The company primarily operates as a domain name buyer’s broker, so I suspect most of the value from these deals came from helping businesses acquire domain names.

ASI Upgrades to ASI.com Following Series C at $3 Billion Valuation

A company called ASI announced a $325 million Series C funding round this week at a $3 billion valuation. The company recently acquired the valuable ASI.com domain name.

ASI was originally known as Airspace Intelligence, and it has operated on the hyphenated Airspace-Intelligence.com domain name. It has used ASI as an abbreviated name for quite some time and has increasingly transitioned its public-facing branding to ASI. The company’s website and its most recent news releases now prominently use the ASI branding, as does its social media presence and references.

Did Stripe Acquire Treasury.com? (Updated)

Earlier this week, I detected a couple of changes related to the Treasury.com domain name with the help of DomainTools and DomainIQ.com, which I shared in a post on X:

Treasury.com still does not resolve to a functioning website and the Whois record is private. This would indicate the registrant is not publicly known. There has been a fair amount of discussion about who acquired the domain name.