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.link gTLD buyer revealed
Kevin Murphy,
May 18, 2022, 18:02:37 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Another of UNR’s portfolio auction winners has emerged.
This time it’s .link, UNR’s low-cost volume play, and the buyer appears to be a veteran domain investor named Yonatan Belousov.
ICANN records for .link were updated today to name a Maltese company called Nova Registry, an individual named Emanuel Debono, and an email address at nova.link as contacts.
It’s not a great sign when you google a company or person and all the top hits are from the Panama Papers leaks, but of course not every use of offshore companies is shady and ICANN will have done its due diligence.
Digging deeper into the rabbit hole, corporate records show Nova is owned by another Maltese company called Vanderlay Investments, which in turn has Belousov, known in the domaining industry as Yoni and a regular guest on Domain Sherpa, as the sole owner.
The domain nova.link doesn’t resolve to a web site, but it is registered to another Maltese company called Indefinite, which has a nice collection of one-word .com domains for sale.
The new information means we now know the identities of the buyers of 15 of the 23 gTLD contracts UNR put up for sale in April 2021. XYZ, GoDaddy, Top Level Design and Dot Hip Hop all walked away with shiny pre-loved TLDs.
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