Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has acquired ai.com for $70 million, the highest public price ever paid for a website domain, FT reported.
Gartner said the acquisition signals the management’s move into artificial intelligence, an area where global spending is expected to reach nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025. The momentum is even stronger this year, with Bloomberg reporting that the four largest U.S. tech companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft alone, plan to invest a combined $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
The deal, which was completed in April 2025, was done entirely in cryptocurrency, the FT said in a report on Friday, citing GetYourDomain.com’s Larry Fisher, who brokered the deal. This price is more than double the previous record of $30 million when Block.one acquired Voice.com in 2019. Block.one is the owner of Bullish (BLSH), the parent company of CoindDesk. Marszalek spent $12 million to acquire crypto.com in 2018.
Ai.com announced the debut of its consumer-facing platform with autonomous AI agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, these agents are designed to work on behalf of users and perform tasks such as trading stocks, managing calendars, and automating workflows. Marszalek said the platform aims to be a “gateway to AGI” through a decentralized network.
“We are at a fundamental shift in the evolution of AI, moving beyond basic chat to AI agents actually doing things for humans,” Marszalek said. “Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents that improve themselves and share their improvements with each other.”
The platform announced its debut with a Super Bowl LX commercial on Sunday, causing a spike in traffic and crashing the website for several hours. Writing in Monday’s X, Marszalek cited the 30-second ad’s “extraordinary traffic levels” and noted that while the team was prepared to scale, the amount of interest was unprecedented.
