Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of crypto exchange Crypto.com, spent $70 million to buy ai.com, the highest publicly disclosed price paid for a website domain, the FT reported.
The acquisition signals the executive’s move into artificial intelligence, a sector set to reach nearly $1.5 trillion in worldwide spending by 2025, according to Gartner. Momentum will intensify this year, with Bloomberg reporting that the four largest US tech giants alone, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, plan to invest $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
The transaction, which was completed in April 2025, was conducted entirely in cryptocurrency, the FT said in its report on Friday, citing Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com, which brokered the transaction. The price tag more than doubled the previous record of $30 million held by Block.one’s 2019 purchase of Voice.com. Block.one owns CoindDesk’s parent company, Bullish (BLSH). Marszalek spent $12 million to acquire crypto.com in 2018.
Ai.com announced the debut of a consumer platform with autonomous AI agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, these agents are designed to act on a user’s behalf – performing tasks such as trading stocks, managing calendars and automating workflows. Marszalek said the platform aims to be the “front door to AGI” through a decentralized network.
“We are at a fundamental shift in the evolution of AI as we rapidly move beyond basic chats to AI agents that actually get things done for humans,” Marszalek said. “Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents that improve themselves and share those improvements with each other.”
The platform announced its debut with a Super Bowl LX ad on Sunday, generating a spike in traffic that crashed the website for hours. Writing on the X on Monday, Marszalek cited “insane traffic levels” from the 30-second ad and noted that while the team had prepared for the scale, the level of interest was unprecedented.
