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🚨 When TLDs Collide
Welcome to the world of competing blockchain domains and trademarking TLDs, plus a house sells as an NFT and Tim Ferriss' forthcoming collection
Hey there 👋,
In this week’s ALTS by Flippa newsletter I discuss:
Blockchain domain collisions
Acquisition tips from looking at over 1000 deals
Investment opportunities on Flippa
NFT house sells plus Tim Ferriss’ forthcoming collection
Every heading is a discussion channel in the Alts by Flippa discord community - come join over 1850 of us.
Cheers!
#domains
Unstoppable Domains has ceased offering the .coin extension after realizing that the blockchain platform Emercoin launched theirs first. In the announcement, Unstoppable states:
Naming collisions are dangerous for the Unstoppable community and for Web3 as a whole. Multiple versions of a TLD could cause chaos. Imagine sending Bitcoin to the wrong nora.nft, or connecting your wallet to uniswap.crypto and getting a scammer’s website instead of the real one.
It would be great if other players would also do similar, as Freename.io is letting people buy forever versions of Handshake TLDs:
John is the owner of the Handhake TLD .degen which he sells on Namecheap, for example I could register:
Freename also appears to be registering the trademarks of people’s Handshake TLDs:
You can see the application for .token/ at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IGE.ch) Trade Mark Database.
Freename has a trademark page on their site where you can contact them to register your TLDs. I emailed saying I’m the owner of the .lazy/ TLD on Handshake and that I was interested in registering the trademark. They replied with this:
It seems if you want to register a trademark, you need to purchase their version of the TLD.
It’s the wild west out here in web3 domain land right now.
#contentsites
My content site picks on Flippa this week:
#ecommerce
If you’re looking at ecommerce deals, you may want to factor in that this year, the majority of ecommerce sellers (in Kurt Elster’s sizable audience) think Black Friday is going to be worse than last year:
#acquire
Traditional mergers & acquisitions activity continues its steady decline, both in deal volumes and values.
And Michael Girdley, one of the hosts of the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast, put out a great thread on Twitter with 9 biggest learnings from 150 episodes, looking at over 1000 deals (most of which relate to online business):
Most baby boomer businesses are not sellable / have no value
Need to look for buyer-business fit
If a small business is going for cheap, you’ll be buying yourself a job
The effect of the pandemic makes valuing businesses very hard
Get an unfair (skill) advantage
Get concerned when smart, knowledgeable buyers have already passed on a deal
Location-dependent businesses have a time bomb (it’s called a lease)
SBA pre-approval does not exist
Crazy listings mean crazy sellers
#invest
Flippa launched its new Invest product, to allow accredited investors to get equity positions in profitable, cashflowing businesses. Look for the new Invest tab in the search results.
#nfts
Since last week, RoofstockOnChain sold a house sold as an NFT on opensea for $175K USDC:
But what I find hilarious is that right now the best offer on the house / NFT is 0.13ETH or $168:
And in other NFT news, Tim Ferriss is about to launch his own NFT collection called Project 555.
All the proceeds will go to a foundation focused on psychedelic research, and there is no roadmap or discord - it’s basically just an art play so I’m not sure how the floor is going to appreciate.
But as I almost minted Kevin Rose’s Proof Collective back in December, but chose not to (a potential 100 ETH mistake if I’d magically sold near the top) I’ll be getting on the Premint for Tim Tim’s this time.
Ok that’s it for this week. If you’re reading this on the web and you’re not yet subscribed just hit the button below.
ALTS by Flippa is owned by Flippa. Nothing in this email is financial advice and we are not professional investment advisers. We send weekly updates on what we're doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only.