The Dynadot trade platform has completed an auction for the Eth.link domain name. The sale was record-breaking: the domain sold for a whopping $852,000. Manifold Finance has officially announced the purchase. However, the story is not over yet, for the auction results might be challenged in a court of law.
The previous registrant of the domain was Virgil Griffith, one of the founders of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) DAO, which manages a system of blockchain domains on the Ethereum platform. The Eth.link domain hosted the company’s official website and was also used to redirect to websites created on .ETH blockchain domains. Such sites do not resolve in ordinary browsers, but using a link such as example.eth.link makes it possible to get to a website in the example.eth domain.
Griffith was arrested by the FBI in 2019 and is currently serving time in jail for money laundering and helping North Korea avoid economic sanctions using cryptocurrency. For this reason, he could not renew the domain registration, which expired, became available for a new registration, and went up for auction.
According to Domain Name Wire, Virgil Griffith and Ethereum Name Service are suing Dynadot, Manifold Finance and GoDaddy, the registrar of Eth.link. They demand that the auction results be cancelled due to a series of violations. In particular, they claim that GoDaddy was supposed to allow a person authorized by Virgil Griffith to renew the registration. They also argue that the registrar said the domain would expire and go back into the registration pool on September 5, but that it actually happened two days earlier.
