Namecheap CEO Highlights Success of .AI Expiry Auctions

Namecheap was recently named expiry auction partner for .AI domain names. The first batch of expired .AI auctions concluded last week, and hundreds of .AI domain names were sold. Namebio shows 695 .AI sales on Namecheap worth nearly $800,000 in the last month, although I can’t filter down to specifically include the expiry auctions.

One of the things people noticed was the number of seemingly new bidders who participated in the auctions. The Namecheap Market platform has a pop-up indicating the activity level of each bidder. Visitors can hover over the badge next to each bidder nickname, and a popup highlights the bidder’s activity, along with their join date.

A general concern some people may have is that new bidders could be more likely to be non-paying bidders. Obviously, bidders who can’t/won’t pay could unfairly increase the final price for other participants. Whether these bidders would theoretically join to cause problems or simply have payment processing issues on the platform, non-paying bidders can increase the cost of domain names for genuine bidders.

During the auctions, Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall assured people on X that the bidders were being vetted in real time. He also reminded people that some of these new participants had been bidders on other platforms and joined Namecheap Market because of these .AI auctions.

Nevertheless, with hundreds of auctions concluding last week, there was only going to be one way to allay concerns and that would be auctions that are paid for by the winning bidders. Richard followed up with a post on X yesterday evening to share that 91% of closed auctions had been purchased within two days of invoices being sent this past Monday:

Sent out invoices for our .ai auctions from last week on Monday(2 days ago). So far 91% have been paid out of 538 sales and $500k in revenue . Goes to show the power of our platform and the rules and guidelines we’ve implemented to prevent abusive bidding. Just wanted to point…

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) March 5, 2025

I presume some bidders may take a bit longer to pay via wire transfer or pay in batches, so that 91% rate should only increase as payments are processed.

I don’t know what the standard is for payment percentage on closed auctions at Namecheap or other auction platform but I would imagine this is at least in-line with that.