Empowering Domains With Tokenization

Early in 2020, it was announced that Voice.com was sold for a reported $30 million – perhaps the biggest publicly reported all-cash domain sale. This isn’t even the most expensive domains name ever sold: Cars.com was estimated to be valued at $872 million before it was sold. While this isn’t publicly disclosed (there are a lot of non-disclosure agreements in place when it comes to high-value domain sales), we can find enough public sales online and still have a good idea of the domain market and its health over the years.

CarInsurance.com, for example, sold for $49.7 million, Insurance.com sold for $35.6 million, and VacationRentals.com sold for $35 million. You get the idea.

There’s a lot of money to be made even in the listing of domain names and at this point, you might be wondering: how do I get a piece of the pie?

Surprisingly, the tech behind cryptocurrency and NFTs allow everyday joe’s like you and me to get in on this ludicrous market. Using domain tokenization, we can fractionalize ownership of a domain, allowing others to buy and invest in the product by minting tokens to be sold to investors.

This concept might sound very familiar to you – it’s the same concept behind the stock market where companies are able to fractionalize their shares and sell them for varying prices through a centralized exchange. Owners of the token can also generate passive income by offering their tokenized domains for rent – ensuring that they’re able to retain ownership of high-value domains for as long as they want and be secured in knowing that it’ll always come back to them given that it’s hard-coded into the domain’s code.

And that is just the ground floor.

Tokenized domains can be used as payment gateways for cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and their respective companies. From an economic perspective, long-term investors may hold these domain names with the hope of selling them for a higher price in the future while short-term investors look to trade based on their intuition and everyday trading knowledge.

Domains are the real estate of the metaverse and an already competitive market of domain trading will only become more challenging as owners of traditional domains no longer have to bank on a big brand coming along to purchase their high-value domain and its assets, a cult following of believers and aspiring domain traders and professionals will only advance the market and expand the domain trading economy.