The IPv4.Global marketplace has started offering loans secured by public IPv4 addresses. This way, you can get up to $100 million or even more, depending on the specific company and its credit history. The terms of each loan are determined individually. The minimum required number of IPv4 addresses is not named, but IPv4.Global will take into account how quickly the market can absorb the pledged subnets if the debtor does not pay. In addition, the company can organize the sale of collateral on its platform.
The new proposal is based on the experience of Cogent, which took $206 million for five years using its own IPv4 stock as collateral, The Register reports. If it fails to repay the debt and interest on time, bondholders will receive the “collateral” IPv4 addresses. Since all the free blocks have long been allocated, and a truly massive transition to IPv6 has not yet occurred, IPv4 addresses have become a very valuable asset. According to estimates, AWS alone will earn up to $1 billion per year by renting them out to users of its cloud.
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IPv4.Global has already issued a loan secured by IPv4 blocks to an unnamed data center operator for the development of a cloud business. It is worth noting that IPv4.Global is part of the financial company Hilco Global, which is already doing roughly the same thing in other markets – buying up problem assets like a large collection agency for a small price, and then forcing debtors to pay off their debts in full.
Of course, the service will not be in high demand if everyone rushes and switches to IPv6. In this case, users can count on 340 undecillion addresses – humanity will have enough of them practically forever. Some countries, like China, are already taking decisive measures to this end. However, the IT market knows no less exotic examples of working with assets – CoreWeave once borrowed $2.3 billion using NVIDIA accelerators as collateral only to quickly buy even more NVIDIA accelerators. Apparently, this was the right decision.