Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, bought the ai.com domain for $70 million in cryptocurrency, more than doubling the previous public record for a domain sale. Broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain confirmed the price in a LinkedIn post this week. The platform goes live today, February 8, with a commercial during Super Bowl LX on NBC.
The most expensive URL ever (probably)
That $70 million figure comes with a caveat. The previous disclosed record was voice.com at $30 million back in 2019, also a crypto-adjacent buyer. But "publicly disclosed" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Cars.com once appeared in financial filings as an intangible asset worth $872 million, which makes $70 million look quaint by comparison, though that figure wrapped in a whole company, not just a bare domain.
The seller's identity remains undisclosed. Fischer brokered the deal as a single payment, and the domain had been listed at $100 million in March 2025, so Marszalek negotiated a 30% haircut. Whether that counts as a bargain depends on what you think two letters and a dot-com are worth in a market where OpenAI reportedly paid over $15 million for chat.com.
What he's building on it
The press release promises users can generate a personal AI agent in 60 seconds. These agents will, supposedly, send messages, trade stocks, manage calendars, and update dating profiles on the user's behalf. "We are at a fundamental shift in AI's evolution as we rapidly move beyond basic chats to AI agents actually getting things done for humans," Marszalek said, which sounds like something you'd hear at any AI demo day in San Francisco right now.
The company claims each agent can autonomously build features it's missing, then share those improvements across the network. That's a bold architectural claim with zero published technical detail to back it up. No word on what models power the platform or whether it licenses from existing providers. As Engadget noted, the whole thing is "notably lacking in hard details."
Marszalek told the Financial Times he plans to run ai.com alongside his CEO role at Crypto.com, which has over 150 million users. "When we started Crypto.com there were around a thousand different exchanges, and we somehow managed to make it work," he said. "We will make this work one way or another." Confidence isn't the issue here. Timing might be.
A domain with a complicated past
The ai.com domain was first registered in 1993, back when .com registrations were free. It sat for years in the portfolio of Future Media Architects, a Kuwaiti domain holding company. In September 2021, FMA sold it through broker Saw.com to an anonymous buyer reportedly from the NFT space, with an asking price around $11 million, as Domain Investing reported at the time.
Then things got weird. In early 2023, the domain started redirecting to ChatGPT, and media assumed OpenAI had bought it. Sam Altman denied it. By August 2023, the redirect flipped to Elon Musk's xAI. It later pointed to Google's Gemini, then to a Marques Brownlee YouTube video of all things, and in early 2025 it redirected to DeepSeek. WHOIS records suggest none of these companies actually owned the domain. Someone in Malaysia was likely just pointing the redirect wherever the AI hype cycle happened to be that month.
The crypto winter parallel
Engadget's Ian Campbell flagged a pattern worth considering: Crypto.com ran a Matt Damon ad in late 2021 and a Super Bowl spot in early 2022. Bitcoin hit an 18-month low by June 2022. Now Marszalek is back with another Super Bowl ad, and Bitcoin has dropped from around $127,000 in October 2025 to under $66,000 today. That's probably coincidence. But AI.com is launching an agent platform at peak hype, with vague technical specs and a CEO splitting his attention across two companies.
Dropping into an AI ad war
Marszalek's timing puts him in the middle of something bigger than a domain purchase. This year's Super Bowl has turned into an AI industry brawl. Anthropic and OpenAI are publicly feuding over whether ads belong in chatbots, with Anthropic running spots mocking the idea and Sam Altman calling the campaign "dishonest" on X. Google, Amazon, and Meta all have AI-focused ads airing too. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 30-second slots are going for around $8 million, with late buyers paying north of $10 million. Tech ad spending during the game is double what it was at the 2022 "Crypto Bowl," the last time NBC broadcast.
So ai.com's commercial isn't landing in a vacuum. It's competing for attention against spots from companies with hundreds of billions in combined valuation, all trying to make AI feel approachable. Marszalek is betting that the same playbook he used with Crypto.com (buy the category-defining domain, buy the biggest ad slot, figure out the product later) works twice. The domain itself is legitimately valuable. Whether what's built on it justifies a Super Bowl-sized marketing budget is a separate question entirely.
The platform is live at ai.com starting today, with a free tier and paid subscriptions. The Super Bowl LX ad airs during the NBC broadcast of Patriots vs. Seahawks.
