ai.com's Debut Flop: After $70 Million Transaction, Did It Get a '504' Timeout?

Original Title: "From $70 Million Mega Deal to Day One Crash, ai.com's 'Grassroots' Debut"

Original Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

Over the weekend, in addition to the "Bithumb Airdrop of 620,000 BTC" incident, another news broke the circle and sparked discussions: the mysterious buyer behind the premium domain ai.com finally surfaced. Contrary to many people's expectations, the buyer was not from a AI giant, but rather from Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Crypto.com.

This deal, reached in April 2025, amounted to a whopping $70 million, allowing the outside world to intuitively sense the astonishing financial power of the crypto community. This transaction not only concluded all ownership disputes surrounding the domain but also put an end to the "top-level domain pointing war" among giants like OpenAI and xAI.

ai.com Domain Dispute: A 3-Year Long Mega Deal Battle

In November 2022, following the emergence of ChatGPT (GPT 3.5), AI became a contemporary discipline, and related domain prices naturally soared.

In February 2023, there were rumors that the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, had acquired ai.com, which was later confirmed to be fake news. However, the listing price of $11 million for this domain in 2021 still stunned many.

In August 2023, the ai.com domain pointing address was changed to the AI company xAI under Musk's ownership, once again attracting significant attention.

Since then, more information about this premium domain has been unearthed: the domain was first registered in May 1993, more than 30 years ago, making it a long-standing historical domain. However, Musk remained indifferent to this matter, once again making it clear to the market that changing the domain pointing address was just a marketing tactic for the ai.com domain holder to "wait for the right offer."

Its reappearance in the public eye was the recent revelation of the "selling price reaching as high as $70 million."

Public information shows that Crypto.com's co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek successfully acquired this premium domain, setting one of the highest domain transaction records publicly disclosed to date; this transaction was facilitated by domain broker Larry Fischer, with payment in cryptocurrency. For reference, this mega deal was twice the price of the previous top-level domain sale of voice.com.

As a well-established cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2016, Crypto.com has always been renowned for its "bold marketing moves," previously conducting market campaigns through sports sponsorships, celebrity endorsements, and more. In 2021, they even splurged $700 million to secure naming rights for a sports arena in Los Angeles.

During a media interview, Kris Marszalek revealed that they had "received more exaggerated resale offers but chose to hold onto the domain name" because he believed this domain name would be crucial for future business trust and awareness. Moreover, he made a bold statement: "Just as we emerged victorious among thousands of cryptocurrency exchanges back then, this time we will also make ai.com successful again."

Thus, the years-long battle surrounding the ai.com top-level domain name has finally come to an end. Just as the market was anticipating and speculating on how Kris Marszalek would use this domain name, he unexpectedly made a big move.

The Botched "Product Launch": ai.com Goes Live but Crashes Within 48 Hours

Crypto.com's Co-Founder and CEO Kris Marszalek posted, stating that they had been silently Buidling after acquiring the domain name and would launch a product during the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 8th. He then mentioned that with the help of the AI Agent on ai.com, users would quickly be able to deploy their own agents to perform a series of operations on their behalf, such as stock trading, automated workflows, calendar scheduling, and executing daily tasks, all maintaining privacy, based on user permissions, and fully controlled by the user.

However, amidst much anticipation, ai.com put on a "crash performance" within less than 48 hours of going live.

This morning, NVIDIA engineer yuhang posted, "This $70 million domain, after an $8 million ad (note: typical Super Bowl ad price), threw a 504 error."

One has to admit that after this incident, it once again confirmed the saying, "The whole world is just a slightly larger stage play."

At the time of writing, the ai.com website has been restored, allowing users to pre-register personal subdomains and AI Agent subdomains to easily experience the platform's corresponding functions. As for whether Kris Marszalek's envisioned "autonomous AI Agent" can be achieved, the author is currently reserving judgment.

The "Mainstreaming Journey" of Crypto Big Shots: Some Buy Houses, Some Buy Power Plants

Another hot topic brought up by the Crypto.com co-founder and CEO's $70 million purchase of a premium domain name is the various mainstreaming journeys chosen by crypto big shots.

Previously, we saw Justin Sun spend millions to win a lunch with Warren Buffett. More recently, the actions of crypto big shots have become even more diverse:

Aave founder Stani Kulechov purchased a £22 million (approximately $30 million) mansion in London's Notting Hill area last November.

Tether CEO Paolo, on the other hand, is more focused on "putting eggs in different baskets." It is reliably reported that Tether has invested its stablecoin business profits in 140 investments covering sectors from agriculture to sports, and plans to expand its staff to 450 people. In addition, Tether's gold reserves have exceeded $23 billion.

In November last year, Justin Sun acquired two small hydropower plants in Norway in one go through his family office SunFund Energy. The total installed capacity is 86 MW, with an annual power generation of about 350 GWh, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 40,000 European households. In the era of AI exploration, Sun, who has always been bold and proactive, chose to hold the "power ticket" to board this era train.

Regardless of the investment results, cryptocurrency has become more widely known in various news as a payment currency, personal symbol, asset class, and more. Perhaps this is also an indispensable part of the mainstreaming process of cryptocurrency.

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