It has been previously reported by others that the money transfer service TransferWise rebranded to Wise, and acquired the Wise.com domain name in 2020. The transaction price for the domain name had not been made public at the time. However, a recent prospectus by Wise can shed some light on the deal.
Today I was able to uncover a $2 million transaction in 2010 for the Chatter.com domain name, using a combination of the SEC's EDGAR database and the historical WHOIS data at DomainTools.com.
The Company sold a domain name in 2010 for $2,000,000, resulting in a gain of $1,895,000 that is presented as a component of other income on the statement of operations.
Exodus Movement, a company involved in the crypto field, has disclosed that they purchased the Exodus.com domain name for USD $1,945,000. This was revealed in a recent SEC filing (page 21):
The Company purchased the exodus.com domain name in the first quarter of 2021 for $1.9 million. The Company considers the domain name to be an indefinite-lived asset so no amortization will be recognized.
While page 21 of the SEC filing mentions the $1.9 million figure, the more precise figure of $1,945,000 can be found on page 9, where the "Indefinite-lived asset" is listed directly on the balance sheet.
As I've pointed out previously, the EDGAR system operated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has a wealth of data. If more researchers searched it regularly, more of these kinds of transactions would be uncovered.
According to page F-38 of a recently published SEC filing, there was a domain name with a book value of $1.5 million, which is being amortized at $100,000 per year. As of December 31, 2020, it had accumulated $533,000 worth of amortization (5.33 years). While the domain name wasn't identified on that page of the SEC filing, page 218 does mention Enjoy.com.
Some additional digging via the WHOIS history at DomainTools indicates that the nameservers of Enjoy.com changed from DreamHost to AWS in the period between August 29, 2015 and September 11, 2015. This timing is entirely consistent with the above amortization, since 5.33 years before December 31, 2020 is early September 2015. Furthermore, Archive.org shows a change in the website around that time.
If accepted by DNJournal, this would rank #3 for publicly reported domain name transactions in 2015.
ICANN holds themselves out as an organization that is highly competent, but that could not be further from the truth. More evidence of their utter incompetence can be seen in the ICANN RPM PDP Phase 1 final report, which has a deadline for public comments of May 21, 2021 (this coming Friday). [Originally the deadline was going to be April 30, 2021, but I demonstrated how that was unacceptable, and they changed it.] I scanned through the document quickly this afternoon, and was appalled that it is replete with glaring and obvious errors. ICANN staff, GNSO Council, and anyone associated with this report should be ashamed that their names are attached to it. Of course, I'm unfairly banished from all ICANN working groups, so I have no responsibility for their obvious errors.
I noticed earlier today that the ICANN public comment period for Phase 1 of the RPM PDP was unreasonably short, going from April 7, 2021 to April 30, 2021, a mere 23 days. As I noted on Twitter:
this didn't make sense, and seemed to me to be an attempt to stifle public input. I submitted a complaint to the relevant ICANN staff, and even submitted a supporting spreadsheet analysis which proved that 23 days is inconsistent with past comment periods.
