Blockchain firms need to focus on domain investors’ biggest challenge

Sales and liquidity, not payments, are the big challenge to overcome.

I don’t spend much time on Twitter/X these days, but I enjoy getting Mike Cyger’s weekly recap of some of his posts there. The prior week it included this discussion regarding payments for domain names and how blockchain could play a role.

I’ve been thinking regarding this for a long time. I’ve heard some blockchain firms and proponents state something like, “It’s ridiculous to pay Afternic/Sedo/Other 15%-25% for domain transactions; blockchain can handle the payments for much less.”

Indeed, it would be ridiculous to pay that much for someone to handle the payment and transfer portion of a domain name transaction. But nobody does. At most, the percentage of commission that can be tied to this is regarding 5%.

I arrived at the 5% number since Atom offers Atom Pay for 4.5%, GoDaddy offers checkout links for 5%, and Escrow.com is generally even cheaper than that (even if there are some hurdles for fresh users).

Nobody looks at an Afternic transaction and thinks, “I’m paying x% commission since they are handling the payment and transfer.”

What you’re paying sales platforms for is finding buyers.

Payments aren’t an issue domain investors struggle with. It’s finding buyers for their domains.

If blockchain technology can do that, then there’s an interesting business here. If all they can do is make payments a little bit cheaper and more manageable, that’s not very interesting.