There was an interesting article published on MorganLinton.com Nov. 9th – After raising over $67M eShares fails to secure the .COM and rebrands to Carta. This brought to light for those not involved in the startup community a major rebrand that just happened in that space.
Basically Carta formerly called eShares (using eSharesInc.com) sent out a very candid email to its client base that it has rebranded to Carta, because it does not own eShares.com. There are a lot of comments on the blog post about whether it was a good, bad or just plain stupid idea for this company to not secure the .COM and move the entire brand to Carta.com.
It is an intriguing topic but most of the comments and even opinion shared by Morgan in a follow up blog post There’s a lively discussion happening on my blog about the eShares rebrand seem to ignore the fact that eShares.com is a developed website and it is partnered with Contrib – A Contribution Platform for Digital Assets on the Blockchain. Many of the comments and one that was featured by Morgan are written as if eShares.com is a parked domain and that the owner probably got too greedy watching eSharesInc.com grow over the last couple years. It is also written that Carta FAILED to secure the .COM.
I happen to think that Carta never even had a chance to buy it. Although the domain is under privacy, I am assuming Chad Folkening a top domain investor and well rounded businessman still owns eShares.com and probably didn’t even flinch when/if offers came in from Carta. I was pretty surprised that two blog posts and many comments could be published on this topic as if eShares.com was just an ordinary parked domain owned by an overly greedy domainer. It took me two seconds to make the connection once I visited eShares.com and I recalled some recent publications on TheDomains and DomainNameWire that spoke about eShares and Contrib here and here. Chad explains in an article on TheDomains that there will be a utility token on the Contrib platform called eShares.
I left this information in a brief comment on the “There’s a lively discussion happening on my blog post..” article last night when there were no comments. I went to the article today there is only one comment from Francois of domaining.com so maybe my comment was censored or got trashed by accident? Anyway, I really don’t think it is a mystery at all why Carta had to rebrand. It appears to me that a very well off domain investor has a business plan with this domain and simply did not want to sell.
Resolved, congrats.
No congrats necessary, I just put 2 and 2 together.
*update
My comment is now approved at morganlinton.com/theres-a-lively-discussion-happening-on-my-blog-about-the-eshares-rebrand/
Not sure what the mystery is. It was a bad move not renaming the company after the initial raise. It was even a worse move informing clients you are rebranding because you couldn’t acquire your EM .com. Poor managerial decisions.
Agreed, they never should have gotten so big on esharesinc.com. I would say where they failed was early in the naming process.