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Crypto.com founder buys ai.com for record $70 million: FT
Kris Marszalek joined the AI industry with autonomous agents and a Super Bowl ad that briefly sidelined the website.
Feb 9, 2026, 11:29 a.m.
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What to know:
- Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, paid $70 million in cryptocurrency for the ai.com domain in April 2025, more than double the previous record price for a web address.
- Ai.com announced a consumer platform built around autonomous AI agents that perform tasks such as trading and scheduling.
- Its Super Bowl ad drew such heavy traffic that the website crashed.
Kris Marszalek, the 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 that reached nearly $1.5 trillion in worldwide spending in 2025, according to Gartner. The momentum will intensify this year, with Bloomberg reporting that the four largest U.S. tech giants alone, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, plan to invest a combined $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
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The transaction, finalized in April 2025, was conducted entirely in cryptocurrency, the FT said in its report on Friday, citing Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com, who brokered the transaction. The price tag more than doubled the previous $30 million record held by Block.one’s 2019 purchase of Voice.com. Block.one is the owner of CoindDesk's parent, Bullish (BLSH). Marszalek spent $12 million to acquire crypto.com in 2018.
Ai.com announced the debut of a consumer platform featuring autonomous AI agents. Unlike traditional chatbots, these agents are designed to operate on a user’s behalf — executing 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 AI’s evolution as we rapidly move beyond basic chats to AI agents actually getting things done for humans,” said Marszalek. “Our vision is a decentralized network of billions of agents who self-improve and share these improvements with each other.”
The platform announced its debut with a Super Bowl LX commercial on Sunday, generating a surge in traffic that crashed the website for several hours. Writing on X on Monday, Marszalek cited "insane traffic levels" from the 30-second ad, noting that while the team had prepared for scale, the volume of interest was unprecedented.
