Merlin Kauffman – True Magic LLC.
The domain Projects.com, registered in 1995 was mysteriously allowed to expire and drop.
Its former registrant, domain investor Merlin Kauffman and his company, True Magic LLC, owned it since 2008, having acquired it for an undisclosed amount.
Somehow, Projects.com appears to have escaped Kauffman’s group of renewals; the domain was registered with Fabulous.com when it dropped.
So who caught Merlin Kauffman’s dropped domain jewel?
Surprisingly, it is not DropCatch, a company that has been known to utilize its extensive Registry resources efficiently.
According to our research, the registrar is ALETHIA DOMAINS, LLC – an Oregon corporation formed in late 2014 and an ICANN accredited registrar linked to SnapNames and its parent company, Web.com.
In other words, SnapNames is currently in possession of the domain, and a private auction should follow.
For the record, Alethia means “truth” in Greek.
It’s a real shame such a priceless domain was allowed to expire in the first place; we might never know why, or what price it will be sold for at SnapNames.
Dropcatch has been losing steam to Snapnames the past few weeks. I think it is only going to get worse from here for them. Stay tuned!
James – Do you have any inside information?
The auction is at Snapnames and should end around 3PM on July 2nd. With pleanty of time left to go, the bidding is over $26K now and one can only expect it to go much higher.
Dan – Are you bidding?
This is a domain that I certainly have interest in adding to our portfolio if the price is right. These auctions really seem to get heated in that last 24hrs. Not often we get open shots at nice domains like this on an auction platform.
No inside information, however I would be happy to point out the daily catches where Snap prevailed over Dropcatch – I do monitor the drops and Snap has been doing a fantastic job. I will update a few after the drop today where Dropcatch lost to Snap.
It appears the catches from dropcatch have been cut significantly – they are losing the big catches to snapnames on a daily basis.
Their public domain auction page paints the true picture – currently down to 39 public auctions when last month they were averaging
double.
358.com need I say more… Dropcatch.com had it’s moment however Snapnames came back hard!