DomainPawn.co.uk has launched for a trail period towards the end of 2009, after a few month of testing the software and administration of the system, the full site launched in the Summer of 2010. DomainPawn.co.uk is owned by GreyWing.co.uk, at GreyWing we buy, sell and develop domain names.

GreyWing has been operating in the domain name industry for over 7 years, we feel we have a good knowledge of the value of domain names (.co.uk only) and see them as web property, this is why we are prepared to loan money against them. If you have .com domain names that you wish to pawn in the same way, you could try sites such as DigiPawn.com (no relation to us).

During the domain process we ask that anyone wanting to lend money first transfers the ownership details of the domain name into a holding account of "Domain Services". We do this for 2 reasons, firstly we can prevent the domain being sold by the person we have lent money to, this is security for us. Secondly "Domain Services" is basically a holding company without operating costs. This means it can never be in any debt and all the assets it holds (customers domain names) can never be in danger of being acquired by any third party. Domain Services simply holds the registration of the domains whilst the debt is active.

The Future, GreyWing has several ventures  and new projects in the pipeline, however on the finance side we are due to launch DomainFinance.co.uk in the coming months. This will be very similar to DomainPawn.co.uk but will help people or companies buy domain names that they do not currently own. This will be unique and the first company in the UK to offer such a product, it will be almost the same as a mortgage company for domain names.

We foresee a big need for domain finance in the coming years as new and upcoming businesses try to obtain expensive names for their businesses. However with all things technical there are always risks about future trends. The main downsides to being a pawnbroker in the co.uk market is that we lend lots of money out on domains that through no fault of our own or our customers, actually become worthless before the debt is to be repaid.

These risks we feel we have explored over and over again and our business model negates the risk that we have to accept as a real threat to our type of operation. These include intervention by Governing bodies into the .uk market, changes in the search algorithms by search engines such as Google, independence of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland and many more that we have gone into in much detail. This is one of the reasons we only deal in .co.uk domain names. We need to keep an eye on these ever developing risks and asses them accordingly on a daily basis.