The rich history behind the Crypto.com domain

Using the WaybackMachine, we can see that the domain was up and running as early as Dec 22, 1996 (although the page supposedly first went live in 1993). Prior to 2018, the domain name crypto.com was owned for more than two decades by a cryptography professor Matt Blaze, who used the domain to spread the message "My Lock, My Key," which is very close to the web3 mantra "Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto."

The goal of the page was to educate "the public, press, and policy-makers about the importance of encryption and the need for meaningful reform of US encryption policy in a way that protects privacy and security on the global information infrastructure." What a legacy.

More recently, Blaze kept refusing to sell the domain to any crypto project, believing many cryptocurrencies were scams. He finally accepted an offer from CDC in 2018, which supposedly was about 10m USD.

You can look at the historical iterations of crypto.com using the way back machine. Here is a snapshot from 1999:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990125094511/http://www.crypto.com/

The earliest version of Crypto.com preserved by the web archive is from 1996. The webpage is simple. We can observe a common theme of a lock and key used in the banner of the website. This theme is due to the subject matter the page was about — cryptography. Cryptography is the process of hiding or coding information (locking the message) so that only the person a message was intended for ( who has the key) can read it. Thanks to u/cream-waste for sharing this info.