For the past two years, the domain Grin-Tech.org has been the main domain of cryptocurrency, Grin Coin.
Unfortunately, someone at the community dropped the proverbial ball and did not pay for the domain’s renewal.
Despite attempts by other members to reclaim the domain past expiration, its registrar was not helpful and the domain dropped.
The auction that followed at DropCatch ended at $2,651 dollars.
Why would someone pick up a dropped domain that belonged to a second tier cryptocurrency such as Grin Coin, that uses an equally second tier protocol, Mimblewimble?
We can speculate that in this case, SEO juice is not the prime reason. While backlinks do exist, they provide another platform through which the new owner – assuming they are having ulterior motives – can launch a phishing campaign.
Think about it: crypto is the new free money, it’s generated via obscure computer functions wasting electricity, and in the end nobody backs it up – unlike, say, your bank savings.
When something goes wrong and your crypto wallet gets breached, you can kiss those funds goodbye.
The Grin Coin community attempted to get the domain primarily on the basis that it might be used by scammers in the future. While they switched their main domain and Github repository links to Grin.mw, the existing inbound links to Grin-Tech.org are not under their control.
In a nutshell: the new owner of Grin-Tech.org has the ability to act in a malicious manner, in an attempt to exploit the existing backlinks. All it takes is to recreate the previous version of Grin-Tech.org and to change links related to how wallets function.
