Badger DAO to acquire ‘Badger.com’ domain for $300,000
The Badger DAO community is ‘sett’ to migrate to some new ‘diggs’: the decentralized finance project will shortly become the new owner of the “Badger.com” web domain.
In a Badger Improvement Proposal listed on governance forums today, BIP-43, BadgerDAO founder Chris Spadafora wrote that the new domain will “quickly increase the value [of the app] across all these categories (daily traffic, referring websites, search engine optimization etc.)”
“As Badger expands to become the most trusted place for anyone to put their Bitcoin to work, it’s important that the first experience for non native crypto users is comfortable and that we help them quickly overcome the common stigma that surrounds the cryptocurrency industry today,” Spadafora told Cointelegraph of the buy.
The story of how the project came into possession of the domain — and why the community needs to vote — is somewhat convoluted.
“Essentially Arben Kane purchased it for $300k with the intention of transferring ownership to the DAO. He went direct to the seller since he knew him personally while I was working with brokers quoting me $500k so the middle men get their cut,” said Spadafora. “Now I’m putting a proposal together to have the community sign off on using treasury funds to buy it from Arben at the cost he paid.”
Despite having a treasury worth well over a half billion in various assets, the DAO cannot purchase the domain outright due to not being a legal entity, ultimately leading to the purchase-vote-transfer process.
Badger isn’t the only DeFi project with a fancy new homepage. Earlier this month, crypto investment fund Future Fund gifted the “sushi.com” domain to multiservice platform SushiSwap. Prior to the migration, SushiSwap’s had been notably scattered across various domains, and the team said they “couldn’t believe” they’d obtained the pricy web property — various domain sales sites had previously listed it for between $600,000 and $1.5 million.
According to SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong, the new domain has been a significant driver of traffic for the project.
"We have seen a 5x in our web3 calls to our Alchemy instances that coincided with the procurement of http://sushi.com. I think from a branding perspective it has been a boon," Delong said.
Something happening over on @defipulse pic.twitter.com/Q6JLsrh751
— Joseph Delong (@josephdelong) March 12, 2021The migration to hot domain properties is part of a larger trend started earlier this year of projects aiming to grow more user-friendly through redesigns and UI/UXs overhauls.