Reserve Price
The lowest price a seller will accept, often hidden, below which an offer or auction bid is rejected.
- glossary
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 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.
Related keywords
- reserve price
- minimum offer
- reserve bid
- floor price
- domain auction reserve
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.