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The domain name market has been booming recently, especially in the cryptocurrency market. First, Huobi.com's Du Jun shared his experience of investing from 1,000 yuan to 80 million yuan in domain names, shocking the cryptocurrency market. Then, there was a rumor that Bitcoin China spent a lot of money to change its domain name to BTCC.com, and then Bitmain's new blockchain project revealed a million-dollar top-level domain name BTC.com. Domain names are related to brands. Companies are willing to pay high prices to acquire domain names, which also reflects the importance of domain names to corporate brands. Recently, Zeng Shengwei (@智比特), who focuses on domain name investment, was interviewed by Babbitt Information to share his experience in domain name investment in recent years and his views on the recent domain name market. When did you start investing in domain names and how did you become aware of cryptocurrency domain names? I started investing in domain names in 2011. I was an amateur at first, and I didn’t invest much. I basically registered domain names manually, and all the domain names I registered were .com.cn. I didn’t pay much attention to domain names before 2013. First, the market was not very good, and second, I didn’t invest much, so the returns were not very significant. At that time, I was still working, so I had nothing to do, and I didn’t have much energy to invest in domain names.
In 2013, domain names increased dramatically, with all kinds of categories and suffixes increasing. In particular, digital domain names increased very quickly, but I personally had relatively few digital domain names at that time. Because the domain names I invested in were mainly application-based, and digital domain names were less used, so I lost a lot of opportunities in 2013.
Why did I invest in Bitcoin domain names? It has something to do with the Bitcoin industry. I came into contact with this industry in November 2013, before the price of Bitcoin reached its peak. At that time, I was very interested in Bitcoin and hosted some offline salons in Guangzhou, where cryptocurrency enthusiasts in Guangzhou exchanged ideas. At that time, everyone in the circle was very enthusiastic, so I started investing in Bitcoin domain names.
The reason why I am optimistic about the domain name in the cryptocurrency circle is that I am optimistic about this industry. It is not based on speculation, but on applications. In addition, from the investment perspective, I have some experience in domain name investment, but not in cryptocurrency speculation. I spend most of my time on domain names now. I have about 400 to 500 domain names in stock, covering most aspects of this industry.
But in the past two years, the price of coins has been hyped up, some dealers are selling their stocks, and some small startups, whether mining or developing applications, can no longer operate. The entire industry has been going downhill, and domain names have generally received less attention.
The domain name market has become hot again recently. What do you think is the reason? Whether the domain name of a special industry is popular depends on the development of the industry. Why is the price of Bitcoin domain name rising again? Because the Bitcoin industry has been settled for two years, and now new applications are gradually being launched, it is not difficult for domain names to attract attention.
The entire domain name market was tepid in 2011 and 2012, but suddenly became popular in 2013. The reason may be that the industry was initially favored by the capital market. In 2013, some bigwigs began to form a group and attracted off-market funds to enter the domain name circle. In 2013, capital was already speculating. At that time, some lending platforms that used domain names as collateral appeared, which was equivalent to adding leverage, and invisibly accelerated the expansion of this market. So we can see the surge from 2013 to 2015.
In this case, the better domain names are no longer available for registration, and you certainly won’t be able to buy cheap domain names through acquisition. So the way to get a domain name now is generally to pre-register. Some domain names will be publicly registered when they expire. When the public registration is open, you can make a reservation in advance and then grab it. Because there are relatively few people paying attention to the digital currency industry, there are relatively few people bidding when pre-registering, which is relatively advantageous. You can often spend very little money to pre-register a relatively good domain name.
In addition to being favored by capital, another reason for the popularity is that域名就是品牌价值. For example, if you print company projects, website addresses, etc. on your business cards, the quality of the domain name is related to your brand value. For this reason, domain names are also rising. Capital has been speculating in 2013. Previously, four-digit and five-digit domain names were speculated. Later, a big boss spent more than one million yuan in one day and bought all six-digit domain names in one day. Now, people are speculating on seven-, eight-, and nine-digit domain names.
What suggestions do you have for terminal brand protection? Terminals should be aware of域名保护. Don't register or get a domain name casually. Wait until the project is online or until the project is big. It is very important to get the domain name before the project is publicly released. Then announce your own project. Miners are very sensitive to information. Once the project is announced, they are likely to get the domain name before you.
There is also the protection of小后缀, such as .cn. When a project becomes big, some protection is needed. Alibaba does a good job in this regard. Alibaba will announce the project only after it acquires all the suffixes, which prevents many people from speculating. For example, the travel platform Alitrip was a branch of Tmall at the time and was not independently operated. Everyone thought it would be independent in the future. Mimi farmers were guessing what kind of domain name Ali would use. If the domain name in their hands was bought by Ali, the price was generally one or two million. Ali released some smoke bombs at that time to mislead.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, it is not a big problem to protect the corporate brand with .cn .net. Many .cn .net are not needed, and when the enterprise becomes bigger, it will be troublesome to take it back.
In your opinion, what is the overall environment of domain name investment at present? Is there a bubble in domain name investment in China? In fact, if we analyze the so-called bubbles thoroughly, we will find that bubbles exist in our lives all the time. The only problem is the size of the bubbles. In the domestic real estate and stock markets, stocks can evaporate 2 trillion yuan a day, but the total market value of domain names is only tens of billions or hundreds of billions. It is still relatively new to the entire economy. This market value is not large, so there are still some big guys playing with it.
The ones who make the most money in this wave are the registrars. Some time ago, when the .cc suffix domain names were being registered, the registrar’s interface crashed almost every day, which shows how popular the registration is.
Of course, domain name prices have risen so sharply in the past two years, so there must be a so-called bubble. The registration cost alone in the past two years is about 200 million yuan a year.
Another point worth mentioning is why the domain name market has been favored by the capital market in the past few years, because域名价格从来没有跌过. No investment product can only rise but never fall, but domain names have been like this so far. As for when it will start to fall and when the market makers will start to clean up the market, no one knows.
The domain name market has a certain threshold and has not yet reached the level of popularization. First of all, investment requires certain skills. Secondly, ordinary people only know what domain names are, but have not been exposed to the investment aspect, so it is still limited to a small circle. In comparison, it is about the same level as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is global. Although domain names are also global, 80% of them are speculated in China.
Let me tell you a little story. Some time ago, the big guys in the domain name circle went to Shangrao, Jiangxi Province for a meeting. Everyone discussed what kind of domain names to hype recently. After the meeting, it was time for lunch. One of the big guys waited at the table for half an hour but didn't see anyone else. He was puzzled, and then thought, could it be that everyone took this opportunity to grab domain names?
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