Candida.com was sold for $100,000 dollars utilizing the Epik escrow process in September, but Kathleen Kalaf, the domain’s former owner, has not received $91,000 dollars as part of the deal.
The money was kept by Epik and although the company has acknowledged the debt it has yet to complete the transaction. Epik, effectively, has kept $100,000 dollars that the domain’s new owner paid, despite the escrow agreement limiting its proceeds to $9,000 dollars, or 9% of the transaction’s value.
In recent weeks, users of Epik and its services have come forward to complain about such payments not completing.
Their balances in real world dollars were converted with or without their consent into Masterbucks, a cryptocurrency that Epic devised more than a decade ago. The 1:1 exchange rate allowed Epik to use real dollars for its operations, while issuing the matching amount in Masterbucks, providing interest on the balance. The Masterbucks ecosystem faced problems with PayPal in the past and this approach only works when the customer is able to withdraw their balance as “real money” at any time.
Brian Royce, the new CEO at Epik, has made promises recently, that he’s turning the company around.
In our interview about the sale of the domain Candida.com, Ms. Kalaf let us know that Epik has referenced “assets” that are on the verge of being sold, in order to produce the necessary liquidity for Epik’s operations.
We were told that Epik has “just turned the corner on the asset sale they have been working on” in order to pay her $91,000 dollars.
One of the Epik assets is DNForum.com, the oldest domain name forum that was acquired by Epik in 2021. The forum isn’t as popular as it used to be and Epik has branded it with its services, declaring it as an Epik asset and using it as it sees fit.
It could be possible that DNForum.com is one of these “assets” that Epik is considering selling, in order to generate real world money for its operational expenses and to pay off existing debt to its customers.
That’d be the umpteenth time that DNForum changes hands, if it happens.
