GoDaddy issued a statement on ETH.link. The story was covered by Web3isgoinggreat.com. The domain name expired on July 26.
From the site:
ENS DAO tweeted that the domain’s owner, Virgil Griffith, is “unavailable”. By this, they mean that he is currently serving his first of five years in prison for helping North Korea evade sanctions. With Griffith “unavailable”, the project has found itself at the mercy of GoDaddy. Welcome to the decentralized web3 we’ve all been promised!
Although GoDaddy previously allowed another person to renew the domain on Griffith’s behalf, they reversed that decision, and now say they intend to allow the domain to expire on September 5.
CoinDesk writes:
The DAO relied on the eth.link site to provide access to information about all ENS names. ENS DAO is already advising its users to switch over to eth.limo, another community operated domain.
GoDaddy issued a statement:
GoDaddy is sharing the following update in acknowledgment of interest among certain parties in the domain eth.link. The registration for this domain expired on July 26, 2022. The domain is currently progressing through the standard expiry lifecycle and is expected to be returned to the registry on Sept. 5, 2022, absent a renewal by the current registrant.
Ahrefs shows a strong profile:
Domain Rating 72
Backlinks 8,511 55% dofollow
Referring Domains 1,156 64% dofollow
The domain godaddy.sucks (not mine) is registered since 2015 and redirecting to godaddy.com – and that matches my personal experience with them. Even if they made a mistake on their side, they will punish you as a customer for it. And it doesn’t matter if you have 1 domain with them or 1000 domains.
Looks like there is an auction running over here for eth.link:
https://www.dynadot.com/market/auction/eth.link
Guess for a few Ethereum they can get it back, price is currently at 6500$ or a bit more than 4 eth.
Auction is currently at 14.200$ and ending in under 24 hours. Hopefully the owner gets it back, as otherwise there is a high risk that the domains is being utilized by someone who will promote crypto scams.
One of the latest examples of a domain like this is bitcoinwisdom dot com which reached over 100.000$ on Godaddy and is now promoting crypto robots in multiple languages with the only purpose to fraud users all over the world.
Update:
Auction ended at $204031.80!