Did Rakuten Pay $260,100 for Link.Link?

A domain investor posted a screenshot from Escrow.com that reportedly shows the Link.Link domain name was sold for $260,000.

According to a Chinese domain name investor who provided screenshots of the transaction, his https://t.co/mBHYK8ZrCp domain was successfully traded on https://t.co/PYyt48xV8h for $260,100. pic.twitter.com/IiXZh6tZ6w

— Shifang Yuan (@hishifang) May 10, 2022

According to the screenshot, the buyer is Domain Licenses Limited and the seller is eName Technology, Co., Ltd. The sale date is not shown in the Escrow.com screenshot. Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it would appear that the transaction was from 2020. The Whois record for the domain name appears to have changed from a China-based domain registrant to Domain Licenses Limited in August of 2020.

The current Whois record shows the registrant of Link.Link is Rakuten Group, Inc. The primary Link.Link domain name does not currently resolve to a website. However, if you search Google for site:link.link, you can see the subdomain Service.Link.Link is being used by Rakuten with its Rakuten Link logo.

The sale is not indexed in NameBio, so I presume this tweet is the first time the sale price was revealed publicly. In looking at NameBio for .Link domain name sales, the highest reported .Link sale price was App.Link, which sold for $30,000. If NameBio can verify the sale price of Link.Link, it would rank as the largest publicly reported .Link domain name sale.