AI.com was sold for $70 million to Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek, with Malay Mail identifying the seller as Malaysian tech entrepreneur Arsyan Ismail. The report says Ismail originally registered the two-letter domain in 1993 for $100, when he was just 10 years old.
The sale closed in April 2025. Although it came in below the $100 million asking price, it still surpassed the previous publicly known benchmark held by CarInsurance.com at $49.7 million. The report also says the full amount was paid in cryptocurrency.
A childhood purchase turned into a record-setting asset
According to the source material, Ismail registered ai.com on May 4, 1993, in Kuala Lumpur using his mother's credit card. The registration cost was $100. At the time, the letters “AI” referred only to his initials, Arsyan Ismail, not artificial intelligence.
That detail matters. The domain was not acquired as a bet on the AI industry decades in advance; it was a personal shorthand that later became one of the most coveted digital assets in tech. From 1993 to 2025, the reported increase in value reached roughly 700,000 times.
The owner had a long record of collecting scarce digital assets
The article describes Ismail as part of Malaysia’s early internet entrepreneur scene. He began his first web project at age 15. Over the years, he co-founded Kawanster in 2003, joined Nuffnang as a senior engineer in 2005, worked at Friendster in 2008, and founded 1337 Tech in 2013. Since 2014, he has been involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency development.
AI.com was only one piece of a larger collection. The report lists other holdings including [email protected], g.gg, aaa.eth, and several rare phone numbers. Taken together, they show a long-term focus on short, scarce digital identifiers rather than a one-off lucky purchase.
Redirects to ChatGPT and xAI fueled speculation
The domain drew intense attention in 2023 after ChatGPT became a global hit in late 2022. At one point, ai.com redirected users to the ChatGPT homepage, leading to broad market speculation that OpenAI had acquired it. Rumored price estimates ranged from $3.8 million to $11 million.
But the source says Ismail never sold the domain at that stage. Instead, he entered into some form of traffic arrangement with OpenAI while keeping ownership. In August 2023, the same domain later redirected to xAI, Elon Musk’s newly launched AI company. That switch made clear the domain was still under the seller’s control and still in play.
Listed at $100 million, sold one month later
In March 2025, Ismail formally put ai.com up for sale through Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com with a stated asking price of $100 million. By April, a deal had been reached. The buyer was not OpenAI, Google, or Musk, but Crypto.com.
The report quotes Ismail on negotiation discipline: “Never over-negotiate, and never try to fish, because you may ruin the entire deal.” With the final price at $70 million, ai.com moved past CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com, Voice.com, and Internet.com to become one of the most expensive publicly recorded domain sales ever, and the only top-tier deal in the list said to be paid entirely in cryptocurrency.
Crypto.com turned AI.com into an AI agent platform
Crypto.com did not buy the domain simply as a branding trophy. On February 8, 2026, the day of Super Bowl LX, ai.com launched as an AI agent platform. The report says users could create a personal AI agent in 60 seconds, with functions that included organizing work, sending messages, operating across apps, and even trading stocks.
Marszalek said the company’s goal was to build a decentralized network of billions of AI agents. The launch was paired with a major advertising push: Crypto.com spent about $15 million on a Super Bowl ad slot. Combined with the domain purchase, the campaign’s total cost reached about $85 million.
Traffic surge knocked the site offline after the ad aired
Minutes after the commercial ran, ai.com reportedly crashed under a flood of traffic. The source says millions of users rushed to the site at once, while Google sign-in verification appeared to throttle requests. For a period, the website was largely unusable.
Even so, the exposure was significant. The material says ai.com’s ad generated 9.1 times the social engagement of the average Super Bowl LX commercial and outperformed AI-related ads from Meta, Google, and Anthropic in that category. Whatever the operational issues, the domain immediately became a centerpiece of attention after the acquisition.