[UPDATED AGAIN ON FEBRUARY 11, 2023: In a more recent filing from Galaxy, we can determine a more accurate figure for the domain name transaction, namely USD $1,761,000. This figure appears in several places in the SEC filing, e.g. as “Cash paid for purchase of intangible asset” on pages F-6, F-49, and F-123; on pages F-22 and F-85, it’s listed as “Indefinite-lived intangible asset”]
[UPDATED AGAIN ON JANUARY 31, 2022: After further information from the buyer’s broker, it turns out that USD $1.8 million was indeed the amount received by the seller of the Galaxy.com domain name. Any additional fees that changed hands between the buyer and the buyer’s broker are more properly characterized as “success fees.”]
[UPDATED ON JANUARY 30, 2022: Based on additional information from the buyer’s broker, it’s now unclear whether the transaction price for the Galaxy.com domain name was USD $1.8 million, so we’ve adjusted the headline and text below accordingly.]
A new SEC filing by Galaxy Digital has disclosed that they purchased a domain for USD $1.8 million last year. See page F-25 of the filing, which states:
During the third quarter of 2021, the Company purchased a website domain name for $1.8 million.
While the SEC filing didn’t reveal the actual domain name, Galaxy.com was the likely candidate for the domain name upgrade, given that their current primary domain name is GalaxyDigital.io. The Galaxy.com domain name is under WHOIS privacy, which doesn’t assist us in proving the ownership of that domain. And there is no active website at present for Galaxy.com. However, there are other clues which point to Galaxy Digital as the new owner of the Galaxy.com domain name.
According to the historical WHOIS (using DomainTools.com), the ownership of Galaxy.com changed hands in October 2021. This is roughly consistent with a purchase in the “third quarter of 2021” (sometimes it can take time to move funds and transfer the domain name after a contract is signed).
The stronger evidence, though, can be found by comparing the DNS of GalaxyDigital.io with that of Galaxy.com. In particular, both domain names share the identical nameservers at Cloudflare:
Name Server: AIDEN.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: ROBIN.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
This implies that they are managed by the same account within CloudFlare, because CloudFlare randomizes the assigned nameservers for users, to make it harder for bad actors to hijack the DNS of a domain name that doesn’t belong to them.
Further digging (“dig” is a network tool, for those who missed that!) shows that both domains also share the same MX record hostnames (servers used for routing email), namely:
us-smtp-inbound-1.mimecast.com.
us-smtp-inbound-2.mimecast.com.
using the services of Mimecast for email. That’s not likely to be a coincidence, but instead is further evidence of common ownership.
Given these facts (and after separate confirmation from the buyer’s broker on January 31, 2022), I think it’s safe to conclude that Galaxy Digital did indeed acquire the Galaxy.com domain name for USD $1.8 million. This acquisition by a crypto company further reinforces the importance of domain names as core components of a digital assets portfolio.