Domain aftermarket and crypto checkout, defined.

An HTTP 301 status response that permanently redirects requests from one URL to another, transferring most SEO link equity in the process.

One of the main use cases for buying an aftermarket domain. Operators 301-redirect every URL on the expired domain to corresponding URLs on a money site to inherit topical authority and link equity. Crawlers reattribute backlinks over the next 2–6 weeks. The technique works best when the redirecting domain and the money site share niche relevance — Google's algorithm increasingly penalizes off-topic redirects.

The secondary market where already-registered domain names are listed for resale by their current owners.

Distinct from a fresh registration ($10/year at a standard registrar), aftermarket .com domains trade for anywhere from $500 to $50,000+ depending on length, brandability, and signals like Wayback history. The main aftermarket venues are Sedo, Afternic, Dan.com, Atom.com, GoDaddy Auctions, and HugeDomains. vaultdom brokers Sedo aftermarket inventory specifically and offers crypto payment, which none of those venues accept directly.

A fixed-price listing on an aftermarket marketplace — the buyer pays the displayed price with no negotiation.

Opposite of an auction or 'make offer' listing. BIN listings settle instantly when the buyer commits, which is why brokered models work well around them: the broker can confirm a price upfront and lock the spread. vaultdom only brokers BIN listings on Sedo. Auctions and offer-only listings are out of scope because they require multi-round operator availability that does not fit the brokered model.

A free public log of every TLS certificate issued for a domain, queryable at crt.sh.

Certificate Transparency logs every cert issued by every public CA — the requirement is enforced by every modern browser. We query crt.sh at /domain/{name} render time and report total certificate count, first-seen, last-seen, unique subdomains, and wildcard certificate count. Useful for detecting past site activity (lots of subdomains = real deployment), past SaaS hosting (many short-lived certs on the same subdomain), and past abuse patterns (suspicious subdomain spam).

The number of years between a domain's initial registration date and today.

Sourced from RDAP, which returns the canonical registry creation date. Domain age is a credibility signal in SEO and a quality input to brokered pricing. A 20-year-old .com with continuous renewal carries far more topical authority than a 2-year-old name, even at the same length. We compute age as the year-diff at render time so it stays current without a refresh job.

A purchasing agent who buys a domain on a marketplace on behalf of a buyer who cannot or does not want to buy directly.

The broker accepts the buyer's funds (in our case, crypto), executes the marketplace purchase (in our case, Sedo BIN in fiat), and pushes the domain to the buyer's registrar. The buyer never interacts with Sedo directly — they have one relationship, with the broker. vaultdom uses the brokered model specifically to bridge the gap between crypto-native buyers and Sedo's fiat-only checkout. Broker fees are usually 10–20% in the industry; we run a flat −20% loss-leader at launch instead.

Automated registration of an expired domain at the moment it returns to the public registration pool.

Distinct from aftermarket purchase. Drop-catchers (SnapNames, DropCatch, NameJet, NameBright) run automated systems that race to register a domain the instant it drops. vaultdom does not do drop-catching — we broker live Sedo listings only. If you want a specific dropping domain, place a backorder with a drop-catcher; it is a different market.

The secret string that authorizes an inter-registrar domain transfer.

EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) auth codes are issued by the losing registrar and entered at the gaining registrar to initiate a transfer. The code is single-use per transfer and expires after a few days if unused. In our flow, we generate the EPP code at Sedo's registrar (TransIP) and email it to the buyer; the buyer enters it at their destination registrar. The receiving registrar then handles the rest of the ICANN-mandated transfer protocol, which can take 0–7 days depending on the registrar.

A third-party holding of funds until the underlying transaction is verified.

In our flow, two escrows are in play. OxaPay holds the buyer's crypto until vaultdom confirms the Sedo acquisition has cleared. Sedo's internal escrow holds the domain registrant transfer until they confirm fiat payment from us. Neither vaultdom nor the buyer ever has direct custody of funds in motion — that is the security guarantee against operator absconding.

A free word-list check against ~150 known global brand names, intended to flag obvious trademark conflicts at curation time.

USPTO does not offer a free search API, and the comprehensive trademark databases (TMC, EUIPO) charge per query. Our scan is heuristic, not exhaustive — it catches obvious matches (e.g. nikeforsale.com) but cannot detect regional or industry-specific marks. The buyer is responsible for clearing any trademark concern before active branding or resale. We refund if Sedo blocks the listing for an active dispute before completing the transfer.

The global non-profit that coordinates the Domain Name System (DNS) at the top level.

ICANN sets the rules for domain registration, transfers, and disputes. Two ICANN rules matter most for an aftermarket buyer: (1) any newly-registered or newly-transferred domain is locked from a further inter-registrar transfer for 60 days; (2) the inbound transfer protocol via EPP code is standardized and supported by every accredited registrar. Both rules apply identically whether the domain was bought via vaultdom or directly from Sedo.

An ICANN-mandated 60-day window after a domain transfer during which a further inter-registrar transfer is blocked.

Once your domain lands at your destination registrar, you cannot transfer it to a third registrar for 60 days. You can still update nameservers, point DNS, sell the domain (via a registrar-internal push or a marketplace push back to Sedo), and use the domain normally — only the inter-registrar transfer is blocked. Plan registrar choice before the purchase, not after.

The ICANN-standardized protocol for moving a domain from one registrar to another via an EPP/auth code.

After we acquire the domain on Sedo, Sedo intra-registrar-pushes it to our brokered account at TransIP (Sedo's registrar). We then generate the EPP code and you initiate the inbound transfer at your destination registrar. The receiving registrar emails the losing registrar, which has up to five days to confirm or auto-approve. Cloudflare Registrar and Porkbun typically finalize in under an hour; Namecheap and GoDaddy take 1–5 days.

A pricing strategy where a vendor sells below cost to acquire customers.

At vaultdom, the 20% discount off Sedo's listed price is our loss-leader spend. We absorb the spread (typically $400–$5,000 per transaction) as a customer acquisition cost, betting that brand recognition and repeat customers in the crypto-native niche will recoup it long-term. Cheaper than buying paid ads at this stage, and more honest signaling. The pricing will move to a flat markup once volume is established; early customers stay grandfathered into the loss-leader rate.

A 0–100 composite domain score from Moz, based on backlink quantity, quality, and link diversity.

Competing with Ahrefs DR and Majestic Trust Flow. DA is computed from Moz's own crawl, which is smaller than Ahrefs' but well-calibrated. We surface DA via the free Moz tier (rate-limited polite scrape, ~10 lookups/IP/day). When present alongside Open PageRank DR, the two signals together are more reliable than either alone — they catch a domain that scores high on one crawl but low on the other (often a manipulated profile).

A free 0–100 Domain Rating proxy backed by Common Crawl, used as our primary DR signal in the absence of paid Ahrefs.

Open PageRank offers 1,000 calls per day on the free tier. We batch through it daily across the featured catalogue. The score correlates moderately with Ahrefs DR (around 0.7) and is more than enough for the 'this domain has accumulated backlinks worth caring about' filter. We do not pay for Ahrefs DR — that decision is documented in our project plan and stands.

The UAE-headquartered crypto payment processor that handles every vaultdom invoice.

OxaPay supports BTC, ETH, USDT (ERC-20 and TRC-20), XMR, plus dozens of other coins. Webhook-based confirmation on the merchant side. No KYC requirement for buyers in practice under $1,000 per month. Each invoice has a one-time receive address, a status webhook, and a refund path. We chose OxaPay over self-hosted BTCPay (avoids running a second VPS) and over MoonPay (which imposes KYC on buyers).

A cluster of domains operated by a single party to point links at a money site.

Black-hat SEO technique. Operators buy expired or aftermarket domains with established backlinks and Wayback content history, rebuild thin content seeded around the original topic, then link out to the money site. vaultdom is a popular pre-screening venue for PBN builders because we display RDAP creation date, Wayback snapshot count, SSL certificate history, and DR/DA on every listing — all the signals needed to filter for PBN-suitable names. Buyers who want operational anonymity across the network pay in Monero and transfer each domain to a different privacy-friendly registrar.

A short, brandable, dictionary-word, or otherwise commercially valuable .com domain that trades on the aftermarket at $500 or more.

Distinct from a fresh registration. Premium .com names are scarce — fewer than 100,000 single-word .coms exist globally, and effectively all of them are already owned. The aftermarket is the only way to acquire one. vaultdom focuses on the lower-mid tier of this market ($500–$50,000 listings) which is the band that benefits most from a 20% discount and the band where crypto-native buyers most often shop.

The successor to WHOIS, returning structured JSON about a domain's registration history.

RDAP responses include the creation date, last-updated date, expiry date, sponsoring registrar (with its IANA ID and contact URL), registrant country, and current statuses (e.g. clientTransferProhibited, serverHold). We query via rdap.org's bootstrap layer, which routes to the authoritative registry (Verisign for .com). RDAP data is displayed on every /domain/{name} page as the Provenance block.

The count of distinct domains that link to the target domain at least once.

Distinct from total backlinks (the raw count of all incoming links, which can be inflated by a single referring domain linking thousands of times). RD is a cleaner authority signal. We surface RD on listings when Moz Free has touched the row (free tier returns DA + RD). Open PageRank does not return RD, only DR.

Full refund within 24 hours plus 10% credit on the next order when Sedo cannot deliver the domain.

Refund triggers: Sedo pulls the listing; seller refuses the registrant transfer; Sedo reports a double-sale; trademark dispute blocks Sedo from completing the transfer. Refunds are paid back to the same wallet that paid, or to an OxaPay-supported refund address provided by the buyer. Refunds settle inside 24 hours and incur the network fee. Once we have acquired on Sedo and the EPP code has been issued, the transaction is final — no refund at that point.

An ICANN-accredited company authorized to register and manage domain names on behalf of registrants.

Registrars sell, renew, and transfer domain names. The buyer's choice of registrar determines DNS management UI, renewal pricing, WHOIS privacy defaults, transfer speed, and customer support quality. vaultdom transfers to any ICANN-accredited registrar that accepts inbound EPP transfers — Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, Porkbun, Dynadot, NameSilo, Gandi, OVH, GoDaddy on the mainstream side; Njalla, OrangeWebsite, 1984 Hosting on the privacy side.

A registry runs the top-level domain (e.g. Verisign for .com); a registrar sells domains under that TLD to end users.

Verisign is the .com registry — they maintain the canonical database of every .com that exists. Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare Registrar, etc. are registrars — they sell .com registrations to end users and pay Verisign roughly $9.50/year per domain wholesale. The distinction matters because RDAP queries first hit the registry, then the registrar; transfer authorization flows through both layers; and ICANN policy is enforced at both layers.

The largest domain aftermarket marketplace, hosting ~19 million for-sale domains worldwide.

Headquartered in Germany. Sedo operates fixed-price BIN listings, auctions, and make-offer listings. Their public keysearch endpoint is unauthenticated and returns every for-sale .com matching a keyword — this is the inventory feed for the vaultdom featured catalogue. Sedo accepts card, wire, and PayPal for buyers but does not accept cryptocurrency. vaultdom is a registered Sedo partner under ID 336308 and acts as a purchasing agent on behalf of crypto buyers.

Sedo's free public listing-by-keyword API, returning all for-sale .com domains matching a keyword.

Endpoint: sedo.com/search/keysearch.php4?key={keyword}. Returns a #-separated list of .com names currently listed for sale on Sedo's marketplace. No authentication, no rate limit observed in practice. We use it as our live inventory feed across 217 curated keywords. The keysearch is the source of every search-driven landing page at /search/{keyword} on vaultdom.

Sedo's per-domain details endpoint that returns the current listed price, currency, and status.

URL: sedo.com/search/details/modal/?domain={d}&partnerid=336308. The endpoint returns JSON-wrapped HTML containing data-price, data-currency (1=USD, 2=GBP, 3=EUR, 4=CHF), and data-exchange-usd attributes. We regex the attrs directly out of the raw body because Sedo ships invalid JSON escapes. Outcomes: 'success' (numeric BIN), 'offer_only' (listed but no fixed BIN), 'auction' (active auction), 'not_listed' (skipped or removed). This endpoint is the source of truth for the current Sedo price displayed alongside our −20% price on every /domain page.

The US federal agency that registers and adjudicates US trademarks.

USPTO maintains the TESS public search interface (free, web-only) and a paid Trademark Assignment Search API. Our heuristic scan links each flagged hit to the corresponding TESS search URL so buyers can verify the match manually. For high-ticket purchases ($10k+) we recommend a paid trademark clearance via a specialized IP search firm before completing the order.

The Internet Archive's free crawler that has been archiving public web pages since 1996.

We surface three Wayback signals per domain: total snapshot count, first-seen date, last-seen date. A long history with regular captures is a strong topical-authority signal — search engines remember the topical context of past content. A first-seen of 2007 with 800 snapshots is a clearly-aged domain; a first-seen of 2024 with 4 snapshots is essentially a new name. Operators buying for 301 redirects or PBN entries weight Wayback signals heavily.

The legacy text-based protocol for querying domain registration data.

Largely superseded by RDAP (which returns structured JSON) but still widely supported. WHOIS responses are generally redacted under GDPR for EU registrants — registrant name, email, address are replaced with privacy-service contacts. RDAP is the same data with the same redactions, in a more parseable format. We use RDAP, not WHOIS, in the enrichment pipeline.

A registrar-offered service that replaces the registrant's contact details in the public WHOIS record with the registrar's contact details.

Cloudflare Registrar, Porkbun, NameSilo, and Njalla enable WHOIS privacy by default at no extra cost. Namecheap and GoDaddy require explicit opt-in (free at Namecheap, free for the first year then ~$10/year at GoDaddy). Privacy-friendly registrars in privacy-friendly jurisdictions (Njalla in Sweden, OrangeWebsite in Iceland, 1984 Hosting in Iceland) go further — they accept crypto for renewals and resist legal-pressure subpoenas.