Crypto.com founder acquires ai.com in record $70M domain deal

Kris Marszalek—the entrepreneur behind Crypto.com—has completed a high-profile purchase of the ai.com domain for $70 million, paying in cryptocurrency and setting a new public benchmark for domain transaction values. The acquisition coincided with the debut of a consumer-facing platform that deploys autonomous software agents designed to perform tasks on users’ behalf, positioning the asset as both a brand anchor and strategic platform gateway. Marszalek’s team introduced the service with a mass-market Super Bowl advertisement; the resulting surge in visitors exceeded expectations and caused several hours of downtime, underscoring gaps between marketing ambition and operational resilience. Executing the sale in crypto is a deliberate signal: it aligns the payment method with the buyer’s background and underscores how large digital-asset settlements are becoming viable for major commercial deals. The $70 million figure more than doubles the prior publicly reported domain record and reframes premium domain pricing for headline, single-term web real estate. For the AI product, owning ai.com offers immediate discoverability and a defensive moat against competitors seeking top-level semantic domains. Yet this is as much a marketing and infrastructure test as it is a purchase; the platform’s early availability was stress-tested under extreme traffic conditions and the outage will shape investor and user perceptions. At a market level, the deal amplifies speculation around valuable internet identifiers and may increase prices for short, generic domains tied to hot sectors. The playbook—buy a succinct, meaningful domain, launch with maximal visibility, and accept early technical friction—reflects a calculated tradeoff between rapid scale and initial fragility. Longer term, the move suggests a strategy that blends decentralized ambitions with centralized control points: a global domain that routes users into a planned decentralized agent network. Regulators and competitors will watch how consumer-facing agent capabilities evolve, particularly when they can execute financial transactions or other high-value actions for users. The transaction and its publicity therefore serve multiple functions: asset acquisition, product-channeling, and a market signal about where capital and attention are flowing in AI and digital-asset ecosystems.