This type of thing is a dream come true for people wanting to launder or clean dirty money.
Brad
Strictly speaking in terms of
clean money
VS dirty money, how does selling subdomains differ from selling domains?
Talk about whales... Michael Arrington aka founder of TechCrunch. I wonder if he has a y.at?
It looks like that sale was more that just the URL?
".. the Infinity Key, granting them power to forge any single two-character Yat of their choosing with a Rhythm Score of 99 or lower"
EDIT: (correction) it looks as if the INFINITY key and the GOLDEN
subdomain were two different auction lots.
just dug a bit deeper and you are correct - hand-registering a yat is credit card only, but yesterdays big discord auction accepted stablecoins.
seems they are paying celebrities also. if only useful projects had as good marketing as these guys
Show attachment 186810
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Any idea who, or what company is behind y.at?
I did a little research, and it looks like it has something to do with Tari Labs and
@NaveenSpark.
It also looks as if they may have initially started out as Emoji ID and later branded to Yat.
From
their TOS.
YAT TERMS OF SERVICE
Last Updated: February 19th, 2021
These Terms of Service (βTermsβ) apply to your access to and use of the Services (as defined in Section 1 below) provided by Emoji ID, LLC DBA Yat Labs, a Delaware limited liability company (Emoji ID, LLC, together with its affiliates and subsidiaries βCompanyβ or βweβ)
Emoji ID, LLC Trademark Applications:
https://uspto.report/company/Emoji-Id-L-L-C
Noting, Emoji ID, LLC initially filed for the TM of Emoji ID, prior to filing the Yat TM.
And the domain/URL
https://emojid.me/terms currently cites what looks to be an older version y.at TOS.
Emojid.me was registered on
May 20th, 2020 by Tari Labs, LLC.
Emojiid.me was registered on
May 21st, 2020 by Tari Labs, LLC.
NameBio shows
Y.at was reported sold via Sedo on
August 4th. 2020
Yes this is very odd.. .the .at is a ccTLD, how can they guarantee "yours forever", renewals? And almost half a mil for a sub-domain, an emoji at that..
.to offers 100 year renewals, most I've ever seen.
Interesting point. Does the same apply to how Jack can sell his first tweet as an NFT?
eg. Say, verisign or whomever shuts down Twitter
.com. Twitter still has their servers, so couldn't they migrate to Twitter.horse, and still keep the first tweet NFT operational and unaffected by any singular right of the dot shut down?
eg, Verisign can shut down .com/jack, but they can't shut @Jack or (.Horse/Jack down.
....
I'm still not quite sure of the play here. Are they trying to be the twitter of emoji handles? I mean, looking back, who would have guessed Twitter usernames would be as valuable as they are today?
IMO, the value in the twitter handle speaks more to the @Handle opposed to the URL Twitter.com/Handle. As folks may tag @Handle in daily conversation, much more likely than they would twitter.com/handle.
Now, looking back at the initial domain, Emojid.me, and wondering why the rebrand to Y.at, I have to ask does it have something to do with not wanting to cause confusion/conflict with the ever popular id.me identity site?
So, if the goal here is to give folks an emoji ID, I'm still not quite sure, why the Y.at part of the URL is necessary. I suppose the same could have been said about the twitter.com portion being necessary. The difference here being, twitter was more than a URL. Which begs the question, what tech is going to power Yat, so even in a catastrophic event such as losing access to the URL, what power will the yat servers be able to carry over to a different URL?