Domain Daily · 23 October 2026

Telegram.ai Reportedly Sells for $92,000 – Edging Out ASI.inc's $90,000 .inc Record

The biggest sale on NameBio's board for 22 October turned out to be a .ai domain: Telegram.ai reportedly sold for $92,000, nudging past the $90,000 that ASI.inc fetched in what's still being called the largest publicly disclosed .inc sale to date.

By Maggi Ferguson

NameBio posted its full daily roundup, putting telegram.ai at $92,000 through Spaceship.com and asi.inc at $90,000 through Ultra.inc at the top of the list. The same numbers turned up on NamePros too, crediting NameBio, so that's one figure travelling rather than two checks landing on the same price. NameBio is a sales-data account, not either seller, so both prices stay reported rather than confirmed as far as I'm concerned. I checked telegram.ai's registry record: it's been held since December 2017, and it shows a registrar transfer on 10 October, which fits a sale moving through the system without confirming what it sold for. Nothing in asi.inc's record points to a date around the reported sale either.

ASI.inc's letters still echo ASI.com, the story about Air Space Intelligence's funding and domain that I've already covered here, so I'll leave that one alone and stick to today's numbers.

The same NameBio report also carried three sales Domain.News had already posted individually: preorders.com at $40,000 through Atom.com, voiceline.com at $25,585 through Fruits.co, and a new one, brainwatch.com, at $25,000 through Afternic, which I hadn't seen reported anywhere else. Of that group, voiceline.com is the only one that's actually shown up in two separate places instead of one post repeating another, so that's the only one I'd call corroborated rather than merely reported twice. Preorders.com's registry record shows a change logged on 21 October, a day before the reported sale, which at least fits the timing of a transfer in progress.

A quiet move for WHP.com

Elliot Silver flagged that WHP.com has moved registrars, from eName with Afternic nameservers to GoDaddy, now sitting behind Whois privacy. He spotted it via DomainIQ and DomainTools data. The domain now runs MarkMonitor nameservers, which tend to show up on names a company wants to lock down, and it forwards to WHP-Global.com. No price, no confirmed buyer, just a domain quietly lining up with a corporate name. Worth watching if WHP Global says anything about it.

What Verisign's paperwork says about .web

DomainNameWire.com dug into Verisign's 10-Q and flagged that the company paid roughly $145 million in deposits for .web, even though the winning auction bid was $135 million. Their read is that the gap may have gone to Nu Dot Co, though that's their inference from the filing, not a confirmed breakdown. The filing also lists $26.2 million in other acquisition costs, which DomainNameWire.com guesses could include a payoff to Altanova. That's speculation on their part too, so I'd hold it loosely.

Separately, DomainNameWire.com reported that Verisign has set another registration record and that .web's sunrise period is now set for December.

My take: the .web numbers are still the more concrete story here, actual filed figures rather than social posts repeating each other. Telegram.ai edging out asi.inc for the day's top spot is more a curiosity than a trend. Both prices come from the same single-sourced place, and the gap between them is $2,000.

Also on my radar

Afternic's Portfolio API, take two: Afternic posted again about the Portfolio API it opened to all sellers, this time walking through how to get an API key. Afternic sells access to its own platform here, so read the push with that in mind.
DropCatch result: Domain Gang noted that Azabu.com sold for $2,649 in DropCatch's latest auction results.
Nvidia.si forwards to Nvidia.com: a NamePros post crediting Domingo flagged that Nvidia.si is now redirecting to Nvidia.com. Domain Gang pushed back the same day, asking whether a forward alone is enough to assume Nvidia bought the name. I'd side with the sceptics until there's a registry record or a statement to point to.
Mike Mann sold WorkWellbeing.com: he posted that it went for $25,000. That's his word alone so far, nothing else to check it against.

So which number are you more interested in: the $92,000 that topped the day, or the $90,000 record for a .inc? Let me know what you think.

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Swapped the lead to Telegram.ai since NameBio's full report shows it as the day's actual top sale, trimmed the ASI.com background to a passing mention (already told), dropped the staffing.si item (already told), and added brainwatch.com, the Nvidia.si forward/pushback thread, and the WorkWellbeing.com sale from the fuller pack. Want this saved to `drafts/2026-10-23.md`, overwriting what's there now?