Reserve Price (Minimum Offer)

A reserve price is the confidential minimum sale price set by a domain seller, below which no auction bid or negotiated offer will result in a completed transaction. In a domain auction, if bidding closes below the reserve, the name is not awarded to the highest bidder — it simply goes unsold. Most major auction platforms (GoDaddy Auctions, Sedo, NameJet) allow sellers to set a hidden reserve, so bidders see the current bid but not whether it has met the floor. A reserve that is set too high relative to market value leads to repeated no-sales and erodes credibility; a reserve set too low risks leaving money on the table. In private buy-now-vs-make-offer listings, the reserve functions as the seller's internal walk-away number during negotiation, often communicated to a domain broker but not disclosed to the buyer. Namefi's smart-contract auction infrastructure can encode a reserve price directly in the contract, enforcing it automatically and transparently without requiring the seller to manually decline bids below threshold. Source: Investopedia, Reserve Price.