In a blog post published yesterday afternoon, Coinbase announced that it would soon launch Coinbase NFT. According to the article Coinbase NFT will become “a peer-to-peer marketplace that will make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier than ever.”
My guess is that Coinbase NFT will be found within the original Coinbase.com website, but the company also owns CoinbaseNFT.com. Whois records at DomainTools show that CoinbaseNFT.com is registered at MarkMonitor, and the domain name was created in March of this year.
Interestingly, Coinbase was not the original registrant of CoinbaseNFT.com. In fact, the company filed a UDRP against the domain name at the National Arbitration Forum. Historical Whois records show the domain name was registered under Whois privacy at Google’s domain registrar.
UDRPSearch.com shows the UDRP was filed earlier this month. The status of the filing is “withdrawn.” This means that Coinbase and the registrant of the domain name were able to reach some sort of conclusion prior to a panelist ruling on the case.
Because withdrawn UDRP proceedings are private, it is unclear what type of settlement was made between the parties. Perhaps the registrant was trying to help Coinbase by protecting the domain name and happily handed it over. Perhaps Coinbase threatened the registrant with litigation should the UDRP proceed. Perhaps Coinbase paid the registrant something to get the domain name more quickly than a UDRP proceeding would allow. I really don’t know.
From a domain name perspective, I don’t think it matters if Coinbase uses CoinbaseNFT.com or simply has it for defensive purposes. It was smart to secure the domain name in advance of the platform launch though.
