Here’s a weird one. Someone bought a .XYZ domain, then redirected it to a name they don’t own

Head scratcher

Every once in a while (okay more than that) something happens in the domain name world that I just can’t wrap my head around. This morning, domain investor and web developer Bogdan Vovchuk shared what might be one of the most confusing domain conundrums I’ve seen yet.

Here’s the tweet:

Velocity.xyz

As you can see from the tweet, domain investor and .IO aficionado Bar happens to own the .IO which he has listed for sale on Squadhelp.

Without reading the tweet you’d assume that the person who bought Velocity.xyz also owns the .IO, but now we know that’s not the case.

So what the heck is going on here?

Here’s my wild and crazy theory. The person who bought the .XYZ is very new to the domain industry and saw Velocity.io listed for six figures on Squadhelp. They then went on a frenzy trying to buy Velocity.something and found the .XYZ for sale for $5,888. Not knowing that .XYZ and .IO tend to sell in different ranges they through they were getting a steal of a deal.

Following me so far? So then, after they bought the name they decided to forward it to the .IO name so that potential buyers see how much the .IO is and they can ask for say $50k for the .XYZ and make it look like a deal.

While I agree Velocity.xyz is a solid name in .XYZ, I do think the buyer paid retail, not wholesale for it. Of course, now that I wrote this they’ll probably prove me wrong and sell it for big bucks in the future and come back and laugh at me when they do…and that would be fair.

For now though I’ll say this one doesn’t make much sense, but I’ve done my best to make sense of it. What do you think, am I close?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton