Coinbase announces Coinbase Ventures but it looks like someone is squatting on CoinbaseVentures.com

coinbase-ventures

Today popular US-based cryptocurrency platform Coinbase announced a new venture arm, not surprisingly called, Coinbase Ventures.

“That’s why today, we’re announcing the formation of Coinbase Ventures. We’ll be providing financing to promising early stage companies that have the teams and ideas that can move the space forward in a positive, meaningful way.
At least in the beginning, our goal is simply to help the most compelling companies in the space to flourish. This means that we don’t have the strategic requirement of formalizing partner relationships with such companies, as some corporate venture programs do. Our focus is on building strong relationships and helping to spur on the development of the ecosystem.” (Source – Coinbase Blog)

I’m not too surprised to see Coinbase making this move, it’s a great way for them to get early access to startups they could later acquire and they might also make some money along the way which never hurts. Also given their expertise it’s safe to say they are going to really good at analyzing and evaluating cryptocurrency technologies.

Of course when anyone announces anything I’m always interested to see what they do on the domain side. It looks CoinbaseVentures.com is owned by someone in England, given that Coinbase.com is registered at a different registrar and at an address in San Francisco (actually a few blocks from my place!) it seems like someone else likely scooped up Coinbase Ventures before the company could get it. I wouldn’t be wildly surprised if they lose it in a UDRP especially given the fact that they registered the domain name only 22 days ago.

My guess is someone got wind of the Coinbase Ventures announcement and registered this domain thinking they could sell it for big bucks later down the road. This is not domain investing or “Domaining” – this is cybersquatting. Too many people confuse domain investors and cybersquatters but they are very different.

I’ll be looking out for the UDRP, my guess is it’ll be coming soon….

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton