We won the 4-year battle for After a 4-year chase and a bidding war, deBridge has found its rightful home at . Here's how it went down. After raising our $5.5M seed in 2021, I tried to buy through DomainAgents, losing bids on $10K, $25K, $50K...in the end we settled for a dot finance domain, like many early stage projects. Every offer we made was declined by the owner, someone in the US who had registered it back in 2008. I even tried reaching out directly, and got zero response. Just in case the owner forgot to renew it, I set a Google Calendar reminder to check the expiration date every year,. Every year the reminder popped up. Every year he renewed it. After 4 years I kind of stopped paying attention, but this year when the reminder popped up, this time the domain wasn’t renewed. Winning the auction We immediately started researching how domain expirations and auctions work. Turns out, it’s not simple! Expired domains go through multiple stages: grace period, redemption, backorder. But eventually we hit an auction on this old-school site, NameJet. To even participate, you have to verify your account manually, go through KYC by phone, and figure out how to fund your bids (the card limit on their site was just $15K). After the expiration grace period, the auction finally went live. We placed a backorder, waited for the start, and then the real battle began. There were over 40 bidders! Every bid extended the timer by 5 minutes, so the auction stretched late into the night. It became a mini war, I’d raise the bid, someone would instantly counter. It went like that for hours. Finally, after dozens of rounds, our bid of $50,999 held as the final one. That was it — after four years, we’d finally won After aaaall that, the payment failed because of their outdated system, and the email said if we didn’t pay within 24 hours, the domain would be forfeited.😂 So we jumped on calls with their support, figured out a wire transfer, and finally — it was done! Say hello to our new home at