A two-letter address just sold for $70 million

In early 2026, the internet briefly stopped to stare.

ai.com changed hands for $70 million — the largest publicly disclosed domain sale in history. Paid entirely in cryptocurrency. The domain was first registered back in 1993, when domains were free. A two-letter address that cost nothing to register just sold for $70 million, 32 years later.

How did ai.com get here?

In 1993, ai.com was registered by a US company. Domain registration was free back then, and nobody thought much of it.

Over the decades, the domain passed through multiple owners. In 2021, Malaysian developer Arsyan Ismail acquired it for $11 million. At the time, that felt like an enormous sum. Then ChatGPT launched.

As the AI boom took off, ai.com briefly redirected to ChatGPT, leading many to assume OpenAI owned it. They didn't — it was just a traffic deal. But the domain's value kept climbing.

In April 2025, Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, paid $70 million for it. He debuted the acquisition with a Super Bowl commercial and launched an AI agent platform under the brand. The site went live that Sunday — and immediately crashed under the traffic.

What is a premium domain?

Regular domains — like mybrand.kr or startup-xyz.com — are new names nobody has registered yet. Anyone can claim one for ₩12,900 a year.

Premium domains are different. They're already taken, impossibly short, and perfectly aligned with a category. ai.com, car.com, voice.com. There's exactly one of each. Forever.

That scarcity is the whole point.

The most expensive domain sales ever

Why spend this much?

Marszalek put it plainly: "There is a big desire for us to own this touchpoint, otherwise you get commoditised."

He's done this before. In 2018, he paid $10 million for crypto.com. That exchange now has 150 million users worldwide. The domain didn't make it successful — but it made the brand impossible to ignore.

The logic: owning ai.com means that every person who types "AI" into a browser has a chance of landing on your platform. At scale, that's worth more than any ad campaign.

But will it work?

Not everyone is convinced.

The AI.com launch drew immediate criticism. Despite the Super Bowl debut, the site went down on launch day. Signing up required credit card details despite no functional product being available. Tech observers called it "peak AI bubble."

History offers a warning too. Voice.com sold for $30 million in 2019 — and the social platform built on it eventually failed. A great domain doesn't guarantee a great product.

Whether ai.com's $70 million price tag was genius or excess depends entirely on what gets built on top of it.

What this means for you

You're probably not buying a $70 million domain. But the lesson still applies.

Good domain names disappear fast, and buying one later costs far more than registering it first. AI-adjacent domains are already being claimed at speed. If you have a brand name in mind, the cheapest move you can make today is searching for — and registering — that domain.

Annual cost: ₩12,900. The cost of waiting: unpredictable.

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