According to the Financial Times, Kris Marszalek, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, acquired ai.com for $70 million, which is the highest price publicly disclosed for a website domain name.
The acquisition marks the executive’s entry into artificial intelligence, an area where global spending will reach nearly $1.5 trillion by 2025, according to Gartner. This momentum will increase this year. Bloomberg reports that the four major US technology giants Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft alone plan to invest a total of US$650 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure this year.
The deal, which was completed in April 2025, was conducted entirely in cryptocurrency, the Financial Times reported in a report on Friday, citing Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com, who brokered the deal. The price is more than double the record of $30 million held by Block.one in 2019 when it acquired Voice.com. Block.one is the owner of Bullish (BLSH), the parent company of CoindDesk. Marszalek acquired crypto.com in 2018 for $12 million.
Ai.com announced the launch of a consumer platform featuring autonomous artificial intelligence agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, these agents are designed to operate on behalf of users – performing tasks such as stock trading, managing calendars and automating workflows. Marszalek said the platform aims to be the “front door to general artificial intelligence” through a decentralized network.
“We are in the midst of a fundamental shift in the development of artificial intelligence as we rapidly move beyond basic chat to AI agents actually doing things for humans,” Marszalek said. “Our vision is to build a decentralized network of billions of agents that are able to improve themselves and share those improvements with each other.”
The platform announced its debut Super Bowl LX ad on Sunday, causing a surge in traffic that crashed the site for several hours. Writing in X on Monday, Marszalek cited “insane traffic levels” from the 30-second ad, noting that while the team was prepared for scale, the interest was unprecedented.
