After being approached by multiple entities and being offered plenty of money, Matt Blaze refused to sell his website, Crypto.com. It looks like his tune has finally changed over the course of a year, as it is being reported that the website has now been sold to Monaco.
Now, a bit of the backstory of why this news is making the rounds. Matt Blaze, a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, purchased the domain Crypto.com and created a website. While your first thought might be cryptocurrency, this domain was purchased back in 1993, when digital currency was still in its infant stages. So why did Blaze purchase this domain? Because of his passion for cryptography, of course.
As you can imagine, with the recent boom in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital currencies, his website gained a lot of attention. Websites with domain names relevant to the world of cryptocurrencies had been previously purchased for large sums of money. Tokens.com sold for $500,000, while ETH.com sold for two million dollars in 2017. There isn"t a hard number for the value of Crypto.com, but some have speculated that it could be worth millions.
In a bit of an odd turn, after refusing to accept offers, Crypto.com has now been sold. The buyer, Monaco, a company with ties to, you guessed it, cryptocurrency. While the sum that had been paid was not disclosed, Monaco CEO Kris Marszalek stated that “If it was only about money he’d have sold it a long time ago.” In addition, he stated that:
“This is a very powerful identity that we are taking on. It’s representative of the entire category so it comes with a huge responsibility on us to carry the torch. We don’t take it lightly and this is one of the things that I think we conveyed successfully, that, as a company, we do have a higher purpose, fundamentally, blockchain and crypto will enable [the next generation] to control their money, to control their data and to control their identity, these are the three fundamental things that weave the fabric of society. For us this is the purpose, we want to acceleration the world’s adoption of cryptocurrency”
Monaco will carry on, it will be under a new parent name, Crypto.com. While its Visa card, wallet and transfer service will become MCO.
Source: TechCrunch, The Verge | Image via Crypto.com