February 12, 2021

The IPv4 Address Market – A Few Must-Know’s

In the year 2015, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) fell short of IPv4 addresses and they emphasized the importance for businesses to migrate to IPv6. This also drove the IPv4 sale to new heights. Some businesses needed IPv4 addresses after the exhaustion of the free IPv4 address pool at ARIN and to meet these needs, they turned to other businesses that had spare IPv4 addresses and tried to buy them. These transactions started taking place many years before the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and after the exhaustion, the IPv4 sale market recorded substantial growth. Shared below are some of the important things that you should know about selling and buying IPv4 addresses.

 It Is Legal To Buy Or Sell IPv4 Addresses 

In the early days of IPv4 sales, many believed that it was illegal to sell IPv4 addresses. However, it is completely wrong. It became obvious that businesses wanted to sell and buy IP addresses and so the RIRs got involved and some rules were put into place to facilitate IP address transfer between businesses. With the new rules in place, businesses were able to transfer the ownership of IP addresses, if they met the transfer criteria of RIRs.

The IPv4 Sale Market Is Not Well Understood 

Selling the stock of your company is easy, you can sell it on the New York Stock Exchange. However, for selling IPv4 addresses, there isn’t any central marketplace that can help you get in touch with the buyers. ARIN has indeed put forward IP address transfer policies, but these policies do not dictate how the sellers and buyers would get together. Due to this, the market was inefficient in the early days and over the years many brokers and intermediaries started to facilitate sales. These IPv4 brokers and intermediaries make it easy for buyers to reach out to the most suited sellers.

 The Market Is Dominated By A Few Buyers 

It can be observed that few of the buyers dominate the purchases in the IPv4 market. Most of these buyers are vendors of cloud services, internet service providers, or software providers who need IPv4 addresses to bundle with the software products that they sell. There are many successful repeat buyers in the IPv4 address market. However, in the case of sellers, most of them will only take part in a couple of transactions. If you are looking to buy an IPv4 address and need a good deal, you will need to find a good IPv4 broker who can offer valuable advice on the range of opportunities and the risks involved.