The best domain investment was actually a decision made by a 10-year-old who was way too old for his age.
On February 10, 2026, the Malaysian Daily Mail revealed for the first time the true identity of the seller of the AI.com domain name: ㄩˋ , a 43-year-old Malaysian tech entrepreneur.
Last year, he sold the two-letter domain name to Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek for US$70 million (approximately RM301 million), setting one of the highest domain name transaction records in human history.
It all started with a $100 credit card bill in 1993.
Mom's credit card
May 4, 1993, Kuala Lumpur.
Arsyan Ismail, who was only 10 years old at the time, secretly took his mother's credit card and spent $100 (about 256 Malaysian Ringgit) to register a domain name online: ai.com .
In an era when most people had never even heard of the word "Internet," why would a little boy spend $100 to buy a domain name?
The answer was surprisingly simple: "AI" is an abbreviation of his name: Arsyan Ismail.
It has absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence.
"Back then, there was no concept of AI at all," Arsyan later recalled. His mother was furious when she received the credit card bill; she had no idea what a "domain name" was and only saw that $100 had been inexplicably deducted from her account.
But that $100 was later proven to be the highest-return transaction in the history of human domain name investment, 700,000 times.
Early adopters of digital assets
Arsyan Ismail is not just a lucky domain name buyer. He is one of the earliest internet entrepreneurs in Malaysia.
At the age of 15 (1998), he began his first internet project. His subsequent life trajectory resembles a microcosm of Southeast Asian technological history:
- 2003 : Co-founded Kawanster, Malaysia's first social networking site (similar to Friendster).
- 2005 : Joined Nuffnang as a senior engineer, a pioneering blog advertising platform in Malaysia.
- 2008 : Senior Web Developer at Friendster
- 2013 : Founded 1337 Tech, developing enterprise applications.
- Since 2014 : Became an early believer in Bitcoin and devoted myself to blockchain and cryptocurrency development.
What is less known is that ai.com is just the tip of the iceberg of Arsyan's vast digital asset collection. His collection includes:
- a@a.ai is touted as the world's shortest email address.
- g.gg claims to be the world's shortest URL.
- aaa.eth is the shortest Ethereum Name Service (ENS) address.
- +6012-222-2222 The rarest Maxis mobile number in Malaysia.
- +1-212-222-2222 - One of the rarest phone numbers in New York.
He is not just a lucky lottery winner; he is a hunter who has spent thirty years systematically collecting rare digital resources.
Tech giants are fighting for seats
The real crazy story of ai.com begins in 2023.
With the emergence of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the acronym "AI" transformed from an academic abbreviation into one of the hottest keywords globally. Arsyan Ismail's ai.com, overnight, became one of the most sought-after digital assets in the tech industry.
Here is ai.com's roulette wheel of fortune over the past three years:
February 2023: OpenAI enters the scene.
Shortly after ChatGPT swept the globe, ai.com suddenly began redirecting to ChatGPT's homepage. This led to widespread speculation that OpenAI had purchased the domain for an exorbitant price (rumored to be between $3.8 million and $11 million).
The truth is, Arsyan didn't sell ai.com . He simply reached some kind of traffic redirection agreement with OpenAI. He retained ownership of the domain.
August 2023: Elon Musk hijacks the deal.
Just when the tech world thought ai.com was already a piece of OpenAI's pie, things took a dramatic turn. One morning, users around the world suddenly found that ai.com was no longer redirecting to ChatGPT, but instead redirecting to X.ai , Elon Musk's newly founded AI research company.
This overnight change of leadership shocked the entire tech world. No one knows whether the negotiations were conducted directly with Arsyan Ismail or through an intermediary. But what is certain is that Arsyan orchestrated a brilliant negotiation between OpenAI and Musk.
March 2025: Asking price $100 million
Arsyan has finally decided to make a move. He officially listed ai.com for sale through domain broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com, asking for $100 million.
April 2025: $70 million transaction
The final buyer was not OpenAI, Google, or Musk, but Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com. The deal was for $70 million, paid entirely in cryptocurrency .
This transaction breaks the previous record for the domain name transaction held by CarInsurance.com ($49.7 million), becoming the most expensive domain name transaction ever recorded.
Reflecting on this experience, Arsyan Ismail shared his negotiation insights:
Never over-negotiate or try to "fish" for money; you might ruin the whole deal.
AI.com domain name transaction price vs. historical records
To understand the scale of the ai.com transaction, here are the top five most publicly disclosed domain name transactions in history:
| Ranking | domain name | Transaction price | years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI.com | $70 million | 2025 |
| 2 | CarInsurance.com | US$49.7 million | 2010 |
| 3 | Insurance.com | US$35.6 million | 2010 |
| 4 | Voice.com | $30 million | 2019 |
| 5 | Internet.com | US$18 million | 2009 |
The price of ai.com was almost 1.4 times that of the second-place domain, and it was the only top-level domain transaction paid in full with cryptocurrency.
Crypto.com's $85 million bet
Kris Marszalek spent $70 million to buy ai.com, but his ambitions extend far beyond a single domain name.
On February 8, 2026, the day of the Super Bowl LX, ai.com officially launched, transforming into a brand-new AI Agent platform. Users can create their own private AI agents within 60 seconds. These agents can automatically perform tasks, including organizing work, sending messages, operating across applications, and even trading stocks.
Kris Marszalek has a grand vision:
We are at a fundamental turning point in the evolution of AI.
Our vision is to build a decentralized network of billions of AI agents that can improve themselves and share their improvements with each other, significantly accelerating the arrival of general artificial intelligence (AGI).
To coincide with the launch, Crypto.com also spent approximately $15 million on advertising slots during the Super Bowl. Adding the $70 million for the domain itself, the total cost of this marketing gamble reached a staggering $85 million.
Super Bowl effect: Website crashes, but traffic explodes.
What was the result?
Within minutes of the ad airing, ai.com crashed completely due to a surge in traffic. Millions of users simultaneously flooded the site to try and create their own AI agents, and Google's login verification system appeared to begin throttling traffic, rendering the website virtually unusable.
From a marketing perspective, however, this "mishap" actually became the best form of publicity:
- Community engagement for ai.com ads was 9.1 times higher than the average ad engagement for the Super Bowl LX.
- Outperformed tech giants like Meta, Google, and Anthropic in the AI advertising category.
- The fact that "a website bought for $70 million went down" is free publicity in itself.
This is reminiscent of the 2022 Super Bowl, where Coinbase's incredibly simple ad featuring only a "floating QR code" caused the website to crash, but it also garnered 20 million visits within a minute and was voted the best Super Bowl ad of the year.
Crypto.com has clearly tasted success; being taken down on the Super Bowl stage is not a failure, but proof of success.
From $100 to $70 million
Let's go back to where the story began.
In 1993, a 10-year-old Malaysian boy spent $100 to buy two letters from his name's initials. 32 years later, those two letters were worth $70 million, a return of 700,000 times.
If you had invested that $100 in the S&P 500 index in the same year, it would be worth about $2,200 by 2025. If you had invested it in Bitcoin (assuming it was worth $0.01 in 2010), it would have been worth "only" about 10 million times.
The story of ai.com may not tell us that "buying domain names will make you rich," but rather that in the digital field, good insight does not mean the most accurate judgment, but rather the longest patience .
