The domain marketplace Sedo announced that the Bot.ai domain name has been acquired for $1,200,000. The deal topped Sedo’s list of the biggest purchases of the week. Furthermore, it became the largest publicly disclosed sale in Anguilla’s country-code domain (ccTLD). The previous record, set last fall by the sale of Wisdom.ai for $750,000, was surpassed by 60 percent.
The manner in which the transaction was executed – specifically, a Buy It Now transaction – is also noteworthy. The buyer (whose identity has not been disclosed so far) saw the domain listed for sale for $1,200,000 and immediately paid the asking price. There was no direct contact with the seller, no attempt to negotiate a discount, and no payment plan. The comparison to hot cakes may be a cliché, but it is difficult to avoid in this case. Domain names related to artificial intelligence are being acquired rapidly and for substantial sums. Further proof of this is the recent sale of the AI.com domain for $70 million, a record in the history of the domain industry.
It is difficult to predict how long the boom in AI-related domain popularity will last. However, in the secondary domain market, names in Anguilla’s ccTLD, .AI, have already become the second-largest extension, surpassed only by .COM names, according to DN Journal. Taking into account new registrations and renewals, many experts estimate that at least half of Anguilla’s budget revenue in the coming year will come from the country’s country-code domain.
