American Rescue Plan : Selling the .com was easy, getting paid was not

The American Rescue Plan is a huge financial stimulus package aimed at transitioning the US through and after the pandemic.

Valued at just under $2 trillion dollars, the plan’s name was first announced by government officials on social media on the evening of January 14, 2021. Moments after that tweet, I registered the matching .com.

AmericanRescuePlan.com started receiving traffic right away. The following day I had two four figure offers at which point I changed the lander to a BIN, thus linking it to Afternic and by the 17th the domain had sold.

If I can go from $8.67 to $5k in two days, I’ll take it.

The domain was registered and parked at Uniregistry but the offers came through the GoDaddy brokerage and the purchase was made on their network. Since I interacted via the Uniregistry Market platform, communications from both Uni brokers and GoDaddy brokers created a strange canvas of exchanges.

It wasn’t clear that the buyer had paid the asking price at GoDaddy and it took a couple of calls to Afternic and Uni to confirm that. When it came down to transferring the domain, I assumed that a push to an Afternic-controlled account at Uniregistry would do the trick.

Unfortunately at that point a broker told the buyer they would have to either accept the push at Uniregistry, or wait 60 days for the domain to be eligible for transfer. I communicated to Uni that keeping that 60 day window might encourage the buyer to pull out of the deal. I was told that the funds were secured, and that it was up to me to seek a cancellation of the transaction.

The buyer flat out refused to receive the domain at a Uniregistry account. My only option was to wait until two months passed, and I did. I was paid ten days after the domain was received into an Afternic-controlled account at GoDaddy, seventy days after the domain’s registration.

The buyer has not received the domain to this day, if I were to trust the GoDaddy WHOIS. For some reasons of their own, they don’t seem to be concerned and it’s not my concern either.

As a footnote, anyone that lists newly registered domains at Uni with a BIN might face the same stubborn buyer due to the Afternic integration. Had the domain sold on Uni Market, the brokerage team would have taken control of the domain and I would have been paid in a matter of days.