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MMX offers 26% premium in latest tender offer, plans to delist

by — Services 0 Comments

Company that sold its assets to GoDaddy is returning cash to shareholders and winding down its operations.

MMX Logo

MMX (AIM: MMX), aka Minds + Machines, is offering its remaining shareholders 10.4 pence per share to surrender their equity in the company.

The top level domain name company sold its domain names to GoDaddy last year and is winding down its operations. Its remaining activities are essentially a support agreement with GoDaddy.

In October, MMX returned the bulk of the cash proceeds to shareholders in a tender offer at 9.6 pence per ordinary share.

MMX will return up to £19 million to shareholders in the new tender offer. The 10.4 pence price is a 26.1% premium to yesterday’s closing price. Shares are up over 10% today but are still trading at just over 9 pence each.

The company plans to cancel trading its shares on the London AIM market as it winds down operations.

Non-.com sales – 2021 top stories

by — Domain Sales 0 Comments

Domains ending in something other than .com sold briskly in 2021.

Image with the words "Non-.com sales 2021 top stories"

.Com is king.

It’s a fair statement. .Com is the largest namespace with nearly 160 million registrations. .Com dominates the domain aftermarket, too.

But for domain investors who dis non-.com domains as an investment, 2021 seemed like a wake-up call.

The best example comes from investor Swetha Yenugula. She has steadfastly invested in .xyz domains over the years, and all of that work came to fruition in 2021. Some of her sales this year include:

glow.xyz $78,888
quest.xyz $69,888
alliance.xyz $50,000
stir.xyz $39,888
collective.xyz $37,000
squid.xyz $34,888

Swetha isn’t the only person to sell .xyz domains. Nikul Sanghvi sold nomad.xyz for $49,000. Kellie Peterson revealed several five-figure sales on the DNW Podcast this month.

.Xyz has benefited from increased demand from blockchain-related companies. For example, Jack Dorsey’s company Square renamed its corporate umbrella Block and uses the domain block.xyz.

It’s not the only non-.com top level domain to realize big sales this year. .Io and .co remain popular. Eth is a great second level domain in any extension. Eth.co sold for $300,000. Eth.club sold for $200,000. These sales might be even more surprising:

eth.cm $112,800
eth.paris $50,000
eth.website $50,000
eth.gg $49,995
eth.green $45,000
eth.pink $30,000
eth.black $30,000

With eth domains, investors who paid attention to trends could cash in.

To make it into the top 10 non-.com sales this year, a domain had to sell for at least $100,000. Last year that number was only $76,300, and the year before, it was $52,820.

.Com is still the safest bet. There are no premium renewals. It’s the de facto upgrade choice. And .com domains sold for record prices this year, too (see other post). But 2021 was definitely a breakout year for non-coms.

Namecheap releases 2021 domain data

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Registrar reports top TLDs, renewal rates, and aftermarket sales.

Chart showing renewal rates at Namecheap. .Ca has the highest renewal rate and .icu has the lowest

Cheap domains have the lowest renewal rates at Namecheap. Graphic from 2021 Namecheap Domain Insights & Trends report.

Namecheap published its 2021 Namecheap Domain Insights & Trends report today. The report provides data on top domain choices, renewal rates, and early sales on its new marketplace.

The share of .com at Namecheap slipped from 48% in 2020 to 45% this year. The company sells a lot of new top level domains, but many of these are heavily discounted extensions such as .xyz, .club and .online. These cheap domains rarely get renewed; Namecheap reports that .icu, .site, .xyz, .club, .website and .store all have lower than 15% renewal rates at the registrar.

On the other end of the spectrum, .ca, .dev, .io and .org renew at greater than 65%. .Com renews at 54% at Namecheap.

More than half of Namecheap’s customers own just one domain and less than a half percent own 100 or more. While the registrar attracts some domain investors, it’s not a huge part of its business. But that might change with its new marketplace launched last month. Top sales so far include namey.com ($20,221), meta.stream ($10,001), InternetRegistry.com ($3,050) and LearnEnglish.ca ($3,050).

The full report is available here.

NFTs trip up Uniregistry’s top level domain auctions

by — Policy & Law 7 Comments

A marketing stunt gone horribly awry?

Image of digital artwork with NFT letters standing for non-fungible token

Frank Schilling’s top level domain company UNR auctioned its 23 top level domain names at the end of April, grossing more than $40 million. To date, none of the TLDs have transferred to the winning bidders.

The holdup is due to what seemed like a marketing stunt to take advantage of the popularity of NFTs.

Prior to the sale, UNR created NFTs connected to Ethereum Name Service for each of the top level domains and said the winners of the auctions would also get an NFT. In a press release, it wrote:

As the exclusive operator of 25 ICANN-accredited domain extensions, including .LINK and .GAME, UNR holds the NFTs that control their namespaces in the Ethereum Name Service (“ENS”) on the Ethereum blockchain. UNR’s Top Level Domains are the first to be turned into ERC-721 NFTs on Ethereum.

23 of these Top Level Domains and their corresponding NFTs will be sold together in no-reserve public auctions on April 28, 2021…

The auction winners of these rare internet assets not only collect subscription revenue by selling their domain names through ICANN-accredited registrars, but could also sell domains on ENS directly to Ethereum owners.

In response to a demand from a winning bidder to complete the TLD transfers, ICANN says it is still waiting for answers from UNR. In a Request for Reconsideration from the buyer for .hiphop (which was sold outside of the auction), ICANN includes a notice dated December 10 stating it continues to object to and withhold ICANN’s consent to all of UNR’s pending assignments. It says it has been trying to get additional information from UNR since May, but the answers have not been complete:

From our first request to UNR for additional information issued in May 2021, we sought to understand the impact of the transactions on the Domain Name System (“DNS”), including how Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) created on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) were being used, and were involved in the transactions. ICANN repeatedly asked UNR for documentation or other information related to NFTs in the hopes that UNR would provide fulsome and complete responses. Only after ICANN’s repeated requests for the transaction and auction related documentation did UNR begin to provide such documentation in October 2021…

…As an example, it has been unclear how such public statements as “the winner of each TLD will receive ownership rights to the Top Level Domain asset…[and.]…the NFT representing their TLD on the ENS” so they could “control the entire TLD namespaces on DNS and ENS” were to be evaluated against the incomplete requests for assignment. As we have communicated to UNR, these statements may not be consistent with important ICANN community-developed policies and agreements that govern registry operations which clearly state any registry operator would have no property ownership rights or interest in a TLD. Further, the creation of such NFTs and potential operation of a suffix identical to the top-level domains in the DNS in an alternate name space may create risks to the security or stability of the TLDs in the DNS.

I suspect that few — if any — bidders care about the NFTs. But the NFT and ENS connection are keeping all of the transactions from completing. This is especially problematic given that the year is ending, and I suspect many applicants hoped to receive their TLDs by the end of the year for tax and business purposes.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to resolve this and if TLD operators can get ICANN’s blessing by disowning the NFT part of the transactions.

[Note: the original version of this story said that .hiphop was acquired in the auction. This TLD was actually sold outside of the auction.]

That time everyone piled into .XYZ

by — Uncategorized 24 Comments

End users are buying .xyz domains. How did we get here, and what happens in the future?

People in purple leotards promoting .xyz

Marketing planted the seeds for today’s interest in .xyz.

Yesterday, Square announced it was rebranding its corporate umbrella to Block and chose the domain block.xyz for its website. Block also uses spiral.xyz for one of its operating businesses.

If you’re suddenly surprised that companies are using .xyz domains, you haven’t been paying attention this year.

Domain investor Swetha Yenugula has been selling .xyz domains like hotcakes all year. You know the first reaction I got when I started posting her sales? Publicly and privately, people called B.S. How was this person selling all of these .xyz domains for four and five figures? Hats off to Swetha for having conviction and investing a lot of money before .xyz became what it is becoming today.

On the surface, .xyz isn’t that great of a domain. Sure, it looks edgy. Being the last three letters of the alphabet is interesting but has limited use cases (see Google rebranding to Alphabet). It’s also a long domain (when spoken) at three syllables. And Z is pronounced differently in lots of English-speaking countries. Many people snickered when Daniel Negari decided to go all-in on this extension.

The team at XYZ set the stage for this, though. I don’t like all of its marketing activities….the domain stuffing and cheap domain sales to look very successful before it was, for example.

But if you look closer, XYZ has been doing a lot of smart things. It got influencers to switch to .xyz. It spent a lot of time highlighting companies and people using .xyz. It marketed at tech events like SXSW.

Ultimately, the community decides which TLDs are successful. The people who pick domains for their websites decide this. And like .io, a lot of people have decided .xyz is a good choice. XYZ planted the seeds and some of those sprouted. Once they sprout, the new seeds blow around and spread.

Blockchain companies seem to be particularly interested in these domains, and blockchain is having another moment.

Now, there’s a lot of risk to investing in .xyz domains. Who knows where this will all be in a few years. I guess if you believe in blockchain, you should believe in the momentum here. If you think that’s all going to crash, you have to ask yourself if other companies will pick up the mantle. (And I don’t mean to suggest that it’s only blockchain companies using .xyz; it just seems to be driving momentum this year.)

The .xyz surge seems to be built on more than what we saw from .club at the beginning of the year. That was built on the hype for one new platform, Clubhouse. It was also stoked by people trying to sell newbie domain investors on an expensive course. That platform ended up nosediving and those course sellers don’t have a course to sell anymore.

Investing in new top level domains comes with risks, just like all investing. You have to ask yourself if current .xyz prices give you the opportunity for a return. You have to ask yourself if prices will keep increasing. At Sav.com auctions, unknown.xyz is $2,750 and favorite.xyz is $1210 right now, and will surely sell for more when they close. Will these look like bargains years from now, like old .io sales seem now? I don’t know.

This is a lot of fun to watch.

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