Here are 20 more real .xyz sales to end users.
I was going to write an article about the latest questioning of .xyz domain sales, but yesterday Elliot posted a better article than I was going to write.
Instead, I’ll add a few things to consider and look at more big .xyz domain sales that have been developed this year. It’s a follow-up to my article in June featuring 18 five figure .xyz domain sales this year that have already been developed.
First, I want to mention a few things I think people are overlooking when they look at Swetha Yenugula’s .xyz domain sales.
1. Swetha acquired the almost all of her 20,000+ domains without premiums. .Xyz didn’t have premiums through the reg path when it launched, so if you bought at the launch or picked up expired domains (that didn’t fully delete) later, then there are no premiums. [Update: I checked with the registry and they did have Premium tiers at launch. I also checked with Swetha and she said only one of the domains she owns is a premium.] Not only do non-premium domains sell better, but you can get more reach through networks that won’t take premium domains.
2. Swetha’s sales didn’t come out of nowhere. She played the long game and didn’t make much at first, but plowed her profits back into more domains.
3. Transaction fees for buying and selling domains are quite high, which reduces the incentive to make the “wash sales” you see with NFTs. With NFTs, you can sell domains to yourself (in a different wallet) or amongst friends to make it look like there’s more demand and higher prices. You’re only paying a point or two versus 10%-20%.
OK, now let’s look at .xyz domains that sold for five figures this year that have been developed or forwarded. These are on top of the 18 I featured earlier this year, and don’t include two forwards (Sino.xyz $119,911, Joy.xyz $25,000). Most of these sales were from Swetha (but not all of them_.
Capital.xyz $105,000
Capital calls itself “Banking build for founders”.
Pixels.xyz $74,980
Pixels is a metaverse play that has me seriously missing 80s video games.
Artemis.xyz $53,899
Artemis builds dashboards and sheet plugins for crypto investors and builders to accurately compare and evaluate crypto assets.
Keys.xyz $50,000
This site says it’s building a metaverse technology.
Kinetic.xyz $40,000
Kinetic pulls together NFTs from multiple blockchains.
Happening.xyz $40,000
Happening is working with Superbet Group for sports betting.
Bebop.xyz $39,888
Bebob lets you trade multiple tokens at the same time.
Territory.xyz $39,888
Territory says it will be a web3 ecosystem & NFT marketplace for film & video.
Mural.xyz $39,888
Mural helps companies engage with their customers.
Anagram.xyz $29,888
Another business promoting web3 “ownership”.
Redeem.xyz $28,000
Redeem is a customer rewards platform.
Mythic.xyz $24,980
Mythic is a web3 game.
Singular.xyz $24,500
Singular is an NFT trading platform.
Mantle.xyz $23,420
Mantle claims it’s the “the highest performance layer-2 blockchain, combining modular performance with security and decentralization from Ethereum. Mantle powers anything builders can dream.”
Evermore.xyz $14,888
I guess if you turn your love into an NFT it can’t be broken. Unless you build that into the smart contract.
Overlord.xyz $14,888
Overlord is a web3 game.
Scalar.xyz $12,654
Scalar is an NFT service from arcade.xyz.
Blowfish.xyz $10,523
Blowfish is a crypto security company.
Mozart.xyz $10,000
Mozart helps game developers introduce NFTs to their games.
Antic.xyz $10,000
Antic enables co-ownership of digital assets. The company raised $7 million September.
Strange, ALL the Websites (in this article) seem to have the same Basic layout. I wonder……..
I have just visited all the websites. Not one has a physical address detailed. It is my opinion that these are all “Fake” sales ,not real ones. That is only my opinion. There must be some reason behind it all, and I wont detail my thoughts as to why, could anything such as financial manuevering etc etc
Did you just look at the screenshots or did you actually visit the sites? Some are fully developed with content/games, others are lead gen pages, but all have distinct graphics/layouts and are not using a template. And since these are NFT related, most aren’t going to have physical addresses since what they do is on the blockchain.
Occam’s razor should be applied to most of these far out theories. Instead of some confusing convoluted theory of conspiracy of fake sales and behind the scenes partnerships, perhaps they are simply real sales as all the evidence points to so far?
You’re kidding, right?
I see this too_
(.XYZ) doesn’t make Top 10 list by CrunchBase or Y Combinator in terms of extension usage among startups and top 100 unicorns.
https://jamesnames.com/2022/09/every-extension-used-by-unicorn-companies/
Where is this demand among end users, that shows up in Top 100 public sales?
Also, there is the issue of XYZ Daniel Negari, and the lack of transparency about the $1.5M deceptive data and marketing FTC fine. Credibility is earned and maintained by actions.
How many registry leaders have been forced to pay such a fine? Should ICANN penalize or pull registry accreditation in these situations?
There are too many red flags for me to ever trust or invest in XYZ, dot-Com it is and will continue to be.
FWIW, I’ve always found it odd that – of all the potential 1000s of “potentially valuable” XYZ domains – only a single domainer-speculator has been consistently reporting high $$,$$$ sales. Other “apparently valuable” XYZ sell for a pittance “by comparison” and I cannot attribute that to seller A being smart and seller B being an idiot or clueless IF we are to believe the reported high value sales. But . . maybe everyone else is incompetent. :-/
Does India tax domain sales / resellers? I wonder if these reported sales have ALSO been reported to tax authorities? If they were bona fide sales then I’ll guess India’s taxing authority requires reporting of the income. I could be mistaken but, a preliminary check, suggests that such sales would be treated as income in India.
If the sales were not reported as income but the sales “are real”, does India offer a “bounty” to someone who reports (potentially) unreported income? It could be a huge bounty / reward if there has been a failure to report. Again, if they all have been bona fide sales then there’s likely notthing to look at here. They would / should have been timely reported.
IFF there’s something afoot – like bogus sales reporting to induce speculative registrations – that might lead to multiple issues leading to the failure of this gTLD. Pity the double whammy to those sucked into believing that, of all the new gTLDs, xyz was a path to riches. Pity the fools who thought crytocurrency and NFTs – the supposed big backers of xyz – if they also tossed their money at speculative xyz registrations. The collapse of crypto and NFTs may also lead to the collapse of the supposed appeal of xyz, that is, as goes the crypto and NFT market so goes that domain that staked its reputation and value on the same.
Lastly, for awhile I visited the websites of the reported sales. I join the chorus of those underwhelmed by the mostly cheapo / cookie-cutter websites, sites that seem to belie the acquiring entity being well financed – at least well financed enough to justify the domain sale price. There’s also a tendency for legitimate entities to have a fair amount of publicly available data/info available (start-up and/or investor trackers, etc) to confirm that the company “is real”.
I know lots of people who have sold .xyz domains. Here’s one example:
https://domainnamewire.com/2021/12/20/wordpress-com-xyz-and-distributed-workforces-dnw-podcast-368/
The reason Swetha sells the lion’s share of .xyz domains that have been publicly release is a) she owns the lion’s share of good .xyz domains without premiums and b) she publicly announces many of them.
All the websites are BullS sites
Just show me your tax returns Swetha Trump
Follow the money
“.Xyz didn’t have premiums through the reg path when it launched, so if you bought at the launch or picked up expired domains (that didn’t fully delete) later, then there are no premiums.”
Are you 100% sure about this? Because around 2015, I registered a premium .xyz similar in quality to creative. xyz or product .xyz and the registration and renewal fees were roughly $1,200 on Godaddy (granted, Godaddy’s markups are hideous). The domain was a high-quality name and was freely available to register. (It is now registered and forwards to an end-user’s .associates domain)
As a professional domain investor, I made the decision at the time of renewal not to renew the domain given the lack of traction .xyz had shown in the market (not to mention the Network Solutions unwanted .xyz domains fiasco that had tarnished .xyz’s reputation) and the uncertain payback possibilities of such an uncertain “investment”.
So, not entirely sure that all .xyz’s really were available for pennies and that the holding costs were similarly low, as in this case the cost for a premium .xyz was actually $1,200 a year.
Freddie, I stand corrected. I checked with .xyz this morning and they said they did have premiums at launch. My mistake. I did check with Swetha, though, and she said only one of her domains is premium.
Thanks for the update. Good on you for following up on it.
Most new gtld registries utilized premium pricing structures, making it difficult to find domains of any quality to register at a low price.
Per my recollection, high-quality .xyz’s were available on the open market back in the 2015 timeframe, but most/many carried high registration and renewal fees.
Guess Swetha must have been savvy enough to find, register and renew “premium” .xyz domains that did not have any premium pricing imposed on them. May be possible, but certainly not easy to do.
Andrew, what you say may well be the final word.
The “nice thing” about the POSSIBLE issue with “reported” xyz sales is that, IF there’s something afoot, THEN the very fact that they sales were “reported” makes chasing down the reality of the sales reports a bit easier.
NameBio does a nice job of recording reported xyz sales and therefore it makes an easy tool to see the reported sales amounts and to see what, if anything, has been done with domains reportedly costing $30,000., $40,000 and more.
I just did a quick check.
It’s interesting how many are still sitting idle / don’t resolve or remain within the DNS of a reseller site or, if developed, have that “cheesy look”.
It COULD BE that, some (significant) number of the reported purchases were made by those who were (momentarily) “crypto rich” AND who thought that lanching a site based on an idea might give them an advantage or a chance to chase or attract big bucks. I can’t say that many of the “built” . . cough . . sites have the feel of a site that is showing signs of profitability. Many seem to be build upon the idea of profiting off the next fool.
Of course, none of the above is proof that anything is afoot.
On the other hand, the reported sales data makes it easy for anyone to ask IncomeTaxIndia to “take a look”, especially IF that person has reason to believe something is afoot.
AFAIC, the fact that only an idiot would participate in a scheme to drum up interest in speculatively registering a new gTLD, by publicly reporting bogus sales, suggests that it can’t be happening.
OTOH, if most sales are tied to cryto payments, things get a bit more interesting since that would be one way to make mining for the truth a bit harder and, in theory, might convince someone that such an approach might work. (I’m just spinning up a fictional story here since I have no direct proof of anything actually being done wrongly.)
Since I have no idea of how payments were made for so many high $$,$$$ sales, it’s hard to see what’s actually happening. I assume Ron Jackson of DNJournal has seen the “evidence” of sales and has a trove of information indicating cash vs crypto. (It’s my understanding that Ron vettes / confirms all sales that he reports.)
Probably the best “acid test” for sniffing out real versus bogus sales would be to have the relevant tax authority sniff around. Bona fide sales, made by legitimate players, are reported to tax authorities. (Yeah, it hurts to pay taxes but it helps to sleep at night if you don’t screw around with income taxes.)
If someone wants to dig deeper anyone can Google “India Informants Reward Scheme” to get the ball rolling. If everything is on the up and up then it’s all good. If, however, anyone thought that crypto payments would be less than traceable, it would be unbelievably foolish to then “go public” with those sales. Just keep the $$$$$$ and STFU.
I’ve got to believe no one would be THAT stupid . . but there’s been a whole lot of stupid going on in the domain world, in NFTs, in crypto, etc.
I have no skin in the xyz game so, from one POV, I could care less. I’m happy if someone is actually killing it with domains, especially getting big bucks for domains such as mystic.xyz (for sale at GoDaddy), dust.xyz, spiral.xya, oval.xyz, primitive.xyz, etc well . . good for him or her.
OTOH, it has always bothered me a bit . . made me sad . . to see the utter junk that people have thrown their limited resources at in the domain world. Lord knows I’ve paid for my “domain education” so I’ve done my best to pass on what I have learned . .
. . by being stupid, ignorant, impulsive, buying while tired, etc.
Did you see that NameBio logged into Swetha’s Afternic account and verified the sales, and Reza at Dan confirmed here sales there are legit?
Big UPs to XYZ crew if they somehow pulled this of. This would be the greatest marketing stunt in domain industry ever. However other than attacks from legacy domainers, i’m not seeing any evidence of deception here.
Do you see any proof of deceptive data and marketing practices here?
https://techstartups.com/2022/01/22/daniel-negari-top-executives-xyz-domain-agreed-pay-1-5-million-settle-ftc-lawsuit-deceptively-harvesting-personal-data-millions-consumers/
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/lead-generator-deceptively-solicited-loan-applications-millions-consumers-indiscriminately-shared#.Y4ZVNWYyuwY.twitter
FTC case is bullshit, it was an industry wide practice! Settling FTC case is an addition of guilt.
It seems like it might be dangerous for a woman to succeed on her own in much of India. While having modernized, India is still a very patriarchal society. And to stand out and make your big money sales so publicly visible when vast portions of the population are poor and communities are tight-knit. Anyone who advertises their financial success as she has must be very bold – maybe she should be celebrated for this – but also risks making themselves a potential target for bad actors. Not hoping for anything bad to happen, just saying this angle to the story must be considered.
Why stand out by publicly touting all those big sales?
Hinting and intimating that “someone” should look into whether a person reported income to their governing tax authority is beyond the pale. That isn’t a litmus test for whether a domain sale occured or not. This has become a witch hunt.
Yeah but if you translate the name “Swetha Yenugula” into Swahili and then look at it in a mirror and then turn the mirror upside down while playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” vinyl record backwards at midnight GMT during a harvest moon, it clearly reads: “KELLIE PETERSON 666”!!!!
CONSPIRACY CONFIRMED!!!
Swetha is not a real person and most of those sales aren’t real. Do some research.
Hi Mike Mann,
Can you provide some of the research you have done? Or why would you not provide the research you have done to help others?…as you have helped others in the past (thank you for that)
Mike Mann, what research have you done and what have you found? Why don’t you post it here if you really found something? You’re just coming across as a loser conspiracy theorist providing zero evidence while claiming these sales are fake.