back to article Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

IP address marketplace IPv4.Global has started offering loans on terms that consider public IPv4 network addresses as valid collateral. The loans build on a product announced last year by network operator Cogent, which issued $206 million worth of notes backed by its IPv4 assets. Debt notes are a way to raise money. The …

  1. Bebu sa Ware
    Coat

    If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

    he will claim 0.0.0.0/0 - 255.255.255.255/0 as US sovereign territory before flogging the then previously foreign owned allocations to his mates.

    I wonder what a class B gets these days? A lot of early adopters got class Bs (certainly in AU) which when the organisation connected to the internet were largely unused with applications gateways (proxies), socks proxies and later NA(P)T being popular with RFC 1918 addresses used internally.

    Although it would be ironic if US political shenanigans were to supply the impetus to get universal† adoption of IPv6 done.

    † ex US and KP

    1. Paul Herber Silver badge

      Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

      I expect he'll want to put tariffs on all incoming traffic on 127.0.0.1

    2. gryphon

      Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

      DoD already have 13 Class A's which would be worth about $6.25 billion or thereabouts.

      Would be surprised if one of Musk's minions aren't looking at that.

      UK MOD also have a single Class A which would be worth nearly $500 million so no doubt the chancellor has her eye on that.

      1. dinsdale54

        Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

        A customer I used to deal with had a class A. Their chief technologist had decided in the early 90s that the internet was going to be a "big thing" and simply wrote and asked for one. It also meant that at the time I was dealing with them - late 90s - all the desktops in the company had a valid internet facing IP address!

        It looks like they have sold off a lot of their space already, keeping a mere few hundred thousand addresses for their own use.

        1. DS999 Silver badge

          Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

          I picked up a class C in the mid 90s for myself. Still have it, use it in my home network instead of 192.168. I've been holding onto it until I figure its value has topped out and then I'll sell it, but I admit I hadn't considered the possibility that I could RENT it. Have to look into that!

          I should have been greedy and grabbed a class B, though perhaps a block that large without any advertised routes would have been clawed back by ARIN at some point.

          I wonder who the people renting these blocks are. I'd hate to have my blocked rented to someone doing bad stuff and potentially get into trouble myself since I'm listed as the owner.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

            Mate, I have this one weird trick that gets you a free /16...just turn off DHCP an your network will magically be /16 in the 169.254.0.0/16 range.

            DHCP is clearly a government conspiracy to limit our IP ranges.

      2. Lon24

        Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

        Yep, $500 million would buy a lot of drones - each with its own IPv6 address. That'll confuse the Ruskies ....

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

          or it'd fund the NHS for a day. Well, not even...

      3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

        Except that the smart money has already realised that, as they get scarcer, rental income is greater than a one-off sale. So make that $ 6.25 10^9 per year. Then force some government services to require IPv4 access and then you can charge for it…

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Probably that most of the companies with Class A address don't need them. Just the hassle of getting of them to private address for internal devices is more than the address is worth.

    One of clients I work for has a class A and yet has managed to run out in some areas of the business.

    1. Luiz Abdala
      Joke

      Isn't GM one of them? Imagine if a car is on the dumpster *right now* with a valid ipv4 address on the onstar thingie, just waiting to be recycled.

      1. neilg
        Joke

        I think both Ford & Mercedes Benz also have one.

        Bet you won't see many of those in the dumpster..

  3. Lee D Silver badge

    IPv6

    Love the bootnote because they know EXACTLY what I was about to post...

    Been working on it for.... over a decade by my reckoning.

    1. john.jones.name
      Facepalm

      they dont have to "work" on it... theregister.com is cloudflare and they can do it...

      dont get me started on HSTS policy but for IPv6

      Log in to your Cloudflare account and go to a specific domain.

      Go to Network.

      For IPv6 Compatibility, switch the toggle to ON

      its called dual stack

      you dont need ipv6 on your webservers cloudflare will sort that out and the statistics remain the same...

      this is pure lazy

      1. Ashentaine

        Re: they dont have to "work" on it... theregister.com is cloudflare and they can do it...

        I think the point is to not rely entirely on a third party vendor to do all the work and then hope that they don't bork it entirely with a bad update, or mess up the settings, or just decide to say "well we decided we're going to charge extra for this now, deal with it".

  4. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

    Monopoly?

    I wonder if the financial wizards behind this have worked out that IPv4 addresses are an appreciating asset. Companies using this facility are by definition in trouble, so a significant number will go under. The plan may be to get a controlling proportion of the available address space, and so control the price.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Monopoly?

      That's definitely the plan. If the businesses do fine, they get the interest, and if they don't, they get the addresses because we're not adopting IPV6 fast enough, so for now the prices are only increasing. Cloud providers would be happy to buy them and there's plenty of rental income to be made if you can get enough of them.

  5. kmorwath

    That's explain a lot the slow roll out of IPv6 in some countries - why devalue your assets yourself?

  6. Korev Silver badge
    Pirate

    Default?

    If an organisation did this and defaulted on the loan, I assume they'd lose their range which could well catastrophically break their IT (in addition to the financial problems they were undergoing).

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Default?

      If it looks like a structured, collaterlised financial product with potentially incalculable tail risks, it probably is.

    2. fajensen

      Re: Default?

      OTOH - If an organisation was already migrating to IPv6 they could borrow against their IPv4 portfolio, then default on the loan, thereby selling their IPv4 addresses at a good price. Before anyone else gets the same idea.

      1. neilg

        Re: Default?

        "Default on the loan". Said so glibly, Are you a cousin of the Orange one?

  7. Roland6 Silver badge
    Joke

    “ adopt IPv6, which has hundreds of undecillion addresses up for grabs”

    Only hundreds? Not billions?

    Looks like we might be needing IPv7 sooner than expected.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: “ adopt IPv6, which has hundreds of undecillion addresses up for grabs”

      Yup, it's not quite enough to turn the entire mass of the Earth into nanomachines.

      Its our last, best hope against the grey goo.

  8. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Let me get this straight

    IPv4 - which will eventually be turned off - is being used as loan collateral?

    It's more valuable over time, until it isn't

    1. David Nash

      Re: Let me get this straight

      Do you seriously think IP4 is going to be turned off any time in the next 100 years?

      1. Mike007 Silver badge

        Re: Let me get this straight

        The US government has what should be a very effective plan to end the use of IPv4 globally, and it should take less time than you might expect.

        The current schedule is for humanity to be gone by mid to late August, with nearly all technology having failed and shut itself down by the end of the year.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Holy shit

    I'm using 10.90.0.0/23 on my home network...I'm only using 40 of those addresses, which means I have 200+ spare addresses...anyone want to buy them? You can't use them as public IPs, but if you're running out of IPs on your own LAN these will help.

  10. Blackjack Silver badge

    We need a cheap open source "IPv6 Adaptor for things that only read IPv4" yesterday.

  11. tyrfing

    I'm reminded of, I think it was David Bowie(?) who was selling shares in his portfolio at one point? It was commented on as being a new thing at the time, though it seems to have since been normalized.

    I suppose it's not all that different from getting a loan based on any other intellectual property (as opposed to physical property). I assume the company has the right to use the addresses and hasn't borrowed them from some other entity.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      They're definitely not borrowed. It's a little tricky whether assignment from IANA, or more often assignment from previous structures before IANA inherited management, is the same as ownership. However, since they can be transferred freely for cash, I think it's close enough. It doesn't need to be legally identical to ownership for a loan to work.

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