The last twenty years of consumer tech can be traced through products, and through who owns the cleanest doorways on the internet. Premium domains borrow authority. They make a company feel official before anyone checks the plumbing. Kris Marszalek’s career is a neat case: hardware, deal-commerce, crypto, and now AI, with the same move repeated twice at the highest level: buy the category name, then spend big to force it into the culture.
This is the story from Ensogo’s sudden shutdown, to Monaco’s rebrand into Crypto.com, to the $70 million buy of AI.com, and the Super Bowl LX launch that face-planted into a 503 error because the site depended on one Google login pipe.
Part I: Ensogo and the first crash
Marszalek, originally from Poland, didn’t start in crypto or AI. He co-founded Starline Polska, a consumer electronics design and manufacturing company, then moved into software as co-founder and CEO of Yiyi, a location-based service platform in Hong Kong. In July 2010 he founded Beecrazy, a group-buying and discount retail business in Hong Kong, built to ride the same wave Groupon rode in the West.
Beecrazy became his first major cash-out. In 2013 it sold to the iBuy Group for $21 million. iBuy, backed heavily by Malaysia’s Catcha Group, rolled up regional e-commerce assets and rebranded the public entity as Ensogo. In August 2014, Marszalek was appointed CEO to lead expansion and turnaround work across Australia, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
Ensogo’s model was fragile. It sat between merchants and customers, selling “deals” and moving money around, which works until it doesn’t. In mid-2016 it stopped working in the most damaging way: the company shut down with no warning.
In June 2016, Ensogo abruptly ceased operations across its markets. Customers lost access to purchased deals. Merchants were left with large unpaid receivables. Reports from the time described chaos: staff at the Singapore office allegedly showed up one morning and were physically chased away and locked out. The Hong Kong newspaper The Standard and the Daily Beast reported immediate fraud accusations, seller protest groups on Facebook, and complaints to local police.
The executive timeline added fuel. On June 21, 2016, Ensogo’s board announced it had accepted Marszalek’s resignation, backdated to June 20. Around the same time, the company asked stock market authorities, including the ASX, to delist and stated the parent company would no longer fund subsidiaries. Users and merchants called it an “exit scam,” and the ASX opened investigations into Marszalek, CFO Rafael Melo, and technology advisor Timothy Hitchens.
Crypto.com later pushed back hard. Spokesperson Matt David said Marszalek didn’t sit on Ensogo’s board and held only a “low single digit percentage stake.” The company said the Catcha-controlled board forced liquidation against Marszalek’s advice, and framed his resignation as protest. They also stressed there was no official legal finding of fraud tied to his leadership.
Legal outcomes aside, Ensogo left an obvious lesson: when the brand is small and the infrastructure is weak, trust can vanish overnight. Marszalek’s later businesses lean on the opposite: make the brand so large that people assume stability.
Part II: Buying “crypto”
Within months of Ensogo’s collapse, Marszalek and co-founders Bobby Bao, Gary Or, and Rafael Melo launched a new company in 2016: Monaco. The pitch was crypto-backed Visa debit cards, letting users spend digital assets without the usual conversion steps. In June 2017, Monaco raised about $25 million to $26.7 million through its MCO token during the ICO boom.
Monaco had money, but the name didn’t do the job. “Monaco” suggested casinos and old wealth, not blockchains. To sell the vision “Cryptocurrency in Every Wallet” they wanted the strongest possible shortcut: Crypto.com.
Crypto.com wasn’t just a nice domain. It was a relic from the early web and a symbol from a very different fight. It was registered on May 4, 1993 by Matt Blaze, a widely respected cryptography and security researcher, known for pushing for stronger privacy and safer systems. Blaze taught computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2018, then moved to Georgetown. In 1993 he published “A Cryptographic File System for Unix.” In the 1990s he participated in the Cypherpunks mailing list during the “Crypto Wars,” and in 1994 he became famous for exposing a serious flaw in the NSA’s Clipper chip key-escrow scheme: he showed a brute-force method could let the chip encrypt while defeating the government escrow system. He later served on the board of the Tor Project and in 2015 proposed a DMCA security research exemption.
Blaze registered Crypto.com back when InterNIC ran things and domains cost nothing. For decades he used it as a personal academic hub for cryptography, network security, and policy. He compared holding it to the little house in Pixar’s Up, increasingly hemmed in by skyscrapers.
Then language changed. “Crypto” in public speech stopped meaning cryptography and became shorthand for cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Blaze hated the shift. He warned that parts of the market attracted fraud and weak projects and argued that tying cryptography to the regulatory mess around digital currencies would confuse policymakers and the public. As offers came in from blockchain startups, he said repeatedly that the domain was not for sale.
In mid-2018, he changed his mind. He posted that he’d quietly entered talks and agreed to sell after years of ignoring unserious offers. He stressed he took no equity and had no stake in the buyer. He joked the deal “involved neither tulips nor international postal reply coupons.”
On July 6, 2018, TechCrunch reported that Monaco acquired Crypto.com. The price wasn’t officially confirmed due to NDAs, but domain industry reporting widely pegged it at $12 million. Marszalek later said that if it were “only about the money,” Blaze would have sold long before, implying it took real persuasion.
Monaco then disappeared into the new brand. The company rebranded entirely to Crypto.com, and the original MCO token was eventually phased out in favor of CRO. The $12 million wasn’t a tech buy; it was a trust buy. It made the company feel like the default portal to the entire category.
Part III: Saturation marketing as strategy
After grabbing the domain, Marszalek pushed Crypto.com into mainstream life through sponsorships and constant ads: Formula 1, UFC, FIFA, and more. The clearest symbol came on December 25, 2021: a $700 million, 20-year naming rights deal with Anschutz Entertainment Group to rename the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles as Crypto.com Arena. Home to the Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, and Kings, and host to more than 15 GRAMMY Awards. The company said the $700 million was paid in cash, not cryptocurrency.
Crypto.com also ran big celebrity campaigns, including the October 2021 Matt Damon spot built around “Fortune Favors the Brave.” Critics questioned the spending once the market turned. By late 2022, Crypto.com’s daily exchange volume was reported to have dropped about 91%, from around $4 billion per day to roughly $380 million.
Marszalek’s defense was simple: brand presence buys durability. A company that becomes a name on arenas and a category domain in browsers looks permanent in a fast-moving sector where many brands come and go. The company claimed it scaled to over 150 million users. Whatever you think of the numbers, the method is clear: buy authority, then flood attention.
Part IV: AI.com and why it mattered
As crypto cooled and regulators tightened, the next word fight arrived. “AI” became the label everyone wanted to own. Marszalek went after AI.com to repeat the Crypto.com move.
AI.com’s history is messier than Crypto.com’s. A timeline built from DNS records, WHOIS transfers, and archive traces shows how long the domain sat as a trophy.
AI.com was registered on May 4, 1993. The original registrant was Advanced Instruments Corporation, a Massachusetts analytical instruments company in Norwood. From 1993 to 1996, AI.com served as its corporate site before the company moved online to aicompanies.com.
Later, AI.com was acquired by Future Media Architects (FMA), a Kuwait-owned domain holding company founded in 2002 by Thunayan Khalid Al-Ghanim. FMA accumulated a portfolio reported to exceed 120,000 domains and carried a strict “we don’t sell” posture for years. In October 2014, management of the FMA portfolio moved to Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry platform. By 2019, control shifted to Shareefah Khalid Al-Ghanim following internal litigation.
That “no sale” posture eventually broke. On September 29, 2021, FMA sold AI.com through the broker SAW.com. The price was publicly listed at $11 million. Brokers Jeff Gabriel and Amanda Waltz described the buyer only as a high-net-worth person in the NFT world. WHOIS privacy hid the identity.
The buyer was Arsyan Ismail, a Malaysian tech entrepreneur. He founded Advertlets, worked early at Grab, and had invested early in Bitcoin and digital assets. He didn’t rush to build a product. He used AI.com as a billboard.
Part V: Redirect trolling and the press getting played
After buying AI.com, Ismail ran a simple trick with outsized results: change the redirect and let the world assume ownership. Domain experts call it “redirect trolling.” It worked because journalists see a domain pointing somewhere and treat it as evidence of who controls it.
February 2023: AI.com redirected to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Headlines spread the idea that OpenAI had bought AI.com for millions. OpenAI didn’t rush to shut the rumor down, and enjoyed the free status boost.
August 2023: the redirect moved to xAI, Elon Musk’s new company, forcing quiet corrections.
November 2023: AI.com pointed to the landing page for Grok.
February 2024: it briefly pointed to a Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) YouTube video about AI, then switched to Google Gemini.
January 2025: it redirected to DeepSeek, timed to the surge of interest in Chinese reasoning models.
Each change created a fresh round of “who bought AI.com?” coverage, which served as a repeating reminder that the best AI domain in the world was sitting in private hands. It also quietly poked every major AI company: your competitor is getting the prestige of the address you want.
Ismail’s identity was later connected publicly to AI.com in August 2023 by domain researchers George Kirikos and Bill Patterson. Kirikos pointed out that AI.com used a specific Cloudflare nameserver pair – pam.ns.cloudflare.com and pete.ns.cloudflare.com – one combination among thousands, matching other domains tied to Ismail. Patterson backed it up by mapping broker social behavior: the SAW.com brokers followed Ismail’s accounts shortly after the 2021 sale.
Then came the myth.
When broker Larry Fischer disclosed the sale of AI.com to Marszalek in February 2026, a viral story spread through Malaysian outlets claiming Ismail registered AI.com himself in 1993 at age ten, used his mother’s credit card to pay $100 because “AI” matched his initials, then held it for 33 years and sold for a 700,000x return.
That story collapses under basic history:
Payment rails: in May 1993, online credit card transactions weren’t a normal consumer capability, and the first secure digital payment is generally dated to late 1993 or 1994. CVV codes weren’t introduced until 1997.
Cost: before September 1995, InterNIC domain registration was free, making the $100 detail an anachronism.
Access: commercial dial-up access in Malaysia wasn’t widely available until around 1995, making the “ten-year-old in 1993” story hard to square with reality.
Records: archival trails show Advanced Instruments held the domain in the 1990s and that FMA held it for years after, until the 2021 sale.
The real version is still strong: Ismail placed an $11 million bet in 2021, used the media as a multiplier, and later sold at roughly six times his cost.
Ownership timeline
| Ownership era | Entity / individual | Acquisition cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993–1996 | Advanced Instruments Corp | Free (InterNIC) | Original corporate registrant |
| Early 2000s–2021 | Future Media Architects | Undisclosed | Long-term portfolio hold, rarely sold |
| Sept 2021–April 2025 | Arsyan Ismail | ~$11,000,000 | Redirect trolling era |
| April 2025–present | Kris Marszalek | $70,000,000 | Paid in cryptocurrency |
Part VI: Marszalek buys AI.com and pitches agent software
In April 2025, Marszalek bought AI.com from Ismail for $70 million, paid entirely in cryptocurrency. Public reporting framed it as the most expensive disclosed domain purchase, beating the $49.7 million CarInsurance.com sale in 2010.
Marszalek’s rationale was blunt brand defense: “There is a big desire for us to own this touchpoint, otherwise you get commoditised.” He also leaned into the symbolism: controlling both Crypto.com and AI.com.
He spent much of 2025 hiring an engineering team and building quietly while still running Crypto.com.
AI.com’s public positioning wasn’t “chatbot.” It was a gateway to “agentic AI”: software that takes actions, not just prompts. The framing borrowed from the idea of large action models. Systems that can carry out multi-step tasks across apps on a user’s behalf. The draft even pointed to early industry movement, such as Coinbase working on “agentic wallets,” where an agent can spend, earn, and trade autonomously.
AI.com’s stated mission was to “accelerate the arrival of AGI by building a decentralized network of autonomous, self-improving AI agents that perform real-world tasks for the good of humanity.”
The feature set it advertised was ambitious:
Autonomy: agents that can execute multi-step actions across digital services, including trading stocks, automating business workflows, managing calendars, sorting messages, and updating dating profiles.
Shared improvement: if an agent hits a missing tool, it can build what it needs; those changes then spread across the network so other agents can use them.
Fast onboarding: non-technical users go from signup to a working agent in under 60 seconds by claiming an ai.com/username handle.
Security claims: agents run in isolated environments; data is segregated and encrypted with user-specific keys; actions are permission-bound.
The pitch fused two instincts: crypto’s anti-middleman culture and AI’s usefulness. The marketing implied a public network that avoids a few big companies controlling the most capable systems.
Part VII: Super Bowl LX and the 503 moment
Super Bowl ads often show which technologies are getting mainstream marketing budgets. Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000 became the “Dot-Com Bowl,” full of internet startups that died soon after. Super Bowl LVI in 2022 became the “Crypto Bowl,” packed with exchange ads during a period that later saw major winners and major blowups.
In February 2026, Super Bowl LX picked up the nickname “AI Bowl.” Reports said that out of 66 ad slots, 15 either centered on AI or were made with machine learning tools.
Marszalek chose that stage to introduce AI.com. The company bought a coveted fourth-quarter, 30-second spot – reported around $8 million per 30 seconds – showing glowing orbs colliding into the AI.com logo. The ad pushed viewers to “claim your handle” and deploy a personal agent. With the $70 million domain cost, the launch spend came to roughly $85 million.
Then the public did what the ad asked. Millions visited. And the site failed in public.
Users saw “503 Service Unavailable” errors or got stuck in signup loops. The internet responded instantly with memes and quotes like “how to burn $10M” and “top tier comedy.” Developers on Reddit mocked the team as “vibecoders.” At the exact moment AI.com was supposed to prove it was real, it acted like a placeholder.
The cause wasn’t mysterious. The site had one login path: “Continue with Google.” No alternate sign-in, no redundancy. When hundreds of thousands of authentication requests hit at once, Google’s automated rate limits kicked in. Systems meant to stop abuse and manage load. Google throttled the flow. Because AI.com had built the whole front door around that one pipe, the rate limit effectively shut down the entire product. For a few brutal minutes, the most expensive domain in the world looked like an expensive paperweight.
Marszalek posted on X to address the outage: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS… hitting Google rate limits (which are at their absolute global maximum).” Service returned once the traffic spike eased, but the point landed: a big brand moment can’t cover for basic engineering blind spots.
The Front Door Is Bought. The House Must Hold.
Marszalek’s arc – Ensogo’s collapse, Crypto.com’s brand resurrection, AI.com’s expensive launch – shows a modern growth philosophy. Market power comes less from what the product can do today, and more from owning the symbols that tell people it must be real.
Matt Blaze’s long resistance to selling Crypto.com captured a clash between two meanings of “crypto”: one built in security research, the other built around open networks, new financial rails, and a market that includes both serious builders and bad actors. Marszalek’s purchase proved that the right name can reduce friction and bring users in at scale.
AI.com is the same move at a higher price. Ismail’s redirects showed that a domain can rack up value before a product ships. Super Bowl LX added the missing proof: when you put a simple call-to-action behind the cleanest address in the category, people don’t just nod, they click. Engineers see the outage as a bad day. Marketers see it differently: proof that the demand is real. A hundred million viewers heard “AI.com” and went looking. Now the job is straightforward: turn that attention into a system that holds up under pressure, with solid sign-in, capacity, and clear permission boundaries.
