Catching up here. Quick update.
On the tech and development side, the team continues to make very strong progress. As mentioned, the non-core upstream developments have largely been put in hold in order to focus on the core. The "Office of the CTO" is already in operation with a decentralized A-team, and I am not part of it.
On the domain management side, a "Domain Core Team" has been formed and is comprised of industry veterans Sufyan Alani, May Chen, Sevan Derderian, Anthony Kirlew and Jessica Robison. This is a team of diligent individuals is working well together. No politics. Just results.
On the topic of governance, I am currently the sole Board Director as well as the major shareholder. I am hopeful that we'll see a "Unicorn" grade Board emerge soon. For example, earlier today, I interviewed a retired US Major General with a deep background in security, including cybersecurity.
As for other unanswered comments, in no particular order:
- A legacy URL for triggering SMS codes was disabled on Monday. It was not part of the live SSO but was away to spam people with SMS codes. That was promptly removed. There was no account compromise related to the legacy SMS spam as Epik had moved to Federated Identity in January 2021.
- Joey Camp did receive his notice and his deadline did pass at noon today. As of this evening, I am not aware of any live sites powered by Epik that are outside of our TOS.
- Daily transfers in continue to outpace transfers out
many times over. This pattern has been steady and domains under management continues to rise. The folks who are crying wolf are not doing anyone a great service at this point but they keep this thread active so God bless 'em.
- The escrow business is doing just fine. So far today no less than 5 transactions started with transaction sizes above $100K each. With crypto booming, much of this is crypto-related. As far as I know, Epik is the only registrar-escrow that is also integrated as a licensed crypto exchange.
- As mentioned, Epik has completed about a dozen acquisitions in the last 3 years. For strategic reasons, not all of them get announced. We do talk to a lot of folks. When we say no to a deal, it is often due to bad cultural fit, e.g. a Dutch company that has gone on to become stronger after some transitional assistance.
- I don't actually recall having any M&A discussion with Derek. If any such discussion occurred, it would have been
very preliminary. In general, we don't do a lot of partnerships. We either build or we acquire. In the case of Derek, it is safe to say that there would not have been a cultural fit.
- There will be no re-brand of Epik.com. The Epik brand continues to be healthy. Brand awareness is higher than ever. Our product and service are good and improving. We don't need to be everyone's cup of tea to have a sustainable enterprise. I was encouraged by this poll today:
Looks like the trolls have 8 hours to stuff the ballot:
Show attachment 202006
If you still like Epik, you are definitely not alone despite the determined efforts of the vocal trolls who are running a "struggle session" on this forum for reasons that I could speculate about, but won't!
#BeEpik