The Namecheap platform has completed the auction to sell the Blockchain.ai domain name, whose former owner failed to renew its registration on time. As expected, the lot aroused an extraordinary interest and was eventually purchased for a more than impressive amount, with the bidding winner offering $405,000. However, it looks like the story is far from its end, according to the Domain Name Wire.
The Blockchain.ai former registrant, Howard Gould, is seeking a reversal of the auction results. Here is what he said: he owned the domain name way back from December 2017. Through the registrar OnlyDomains, he set up automatic renewal of the registration, and until recently, the system worked without fail. However, this year, for unknown reasons, a failure occurred, with the registration period for the Blockchain.ai domain expiring on July 19.
Gould learnt about it no earlier than September 21, immediately contacting OnlyDomains to pay for the renewal manually and receive confirmation.
However, he discovered on October 3 that his domain name was put up for auction on the Namecheap platform. (Identity Digital, which administers the .ai national domain, has a partnership agreement with Namecheap and the expired domain names get right there to be auctioned off.) Moreover, the renewal payment made by Gould still had the PendingDelete status.
On October 6, OnlyDomains notified Gould that he also had to pay a fee for restoring the domain registration because its renewal deadline had been missed. Gould made that payment as well, but the domain was listed for sale in the auction. The registrant turned to Identity Digital via his lawyer asking to stop the auction, but to no avail. Now Gould is trying to solve the problem through court procedure: he filed a lawsuit in California, which names OnlyDomains, its parent company CentralNic NZ Ltd, Identity Digital, and Namecheap.
