As I warned in October 2021, an ICANN working group intends to seriously jeopardize domain name owners' legal rights. There was a call for public comments, and my own company submitted a substantial 54 page submission, as did others.
However, the working group just posted to their mailing list a draft of their final report yesterday (see the DOCX attachment at the bottom), one that is essentially unchanged from their highly criticized initial report's 5 recommendations. IGOs are given new rights not present in law, and instead the rights of domain name registrants to due process are ignored.
[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.
