[Izkata]

That reddit link has since been updated with an explanation (basically that it really is just a coincidence):

> Wanted to provide an update on this. As you may or may not know, .quest launched this week, and this is a 3 letter domain on top of that, hence the demand. The registrant of this domain is on our platform but is only a customer who historically has purchased domains in a similar vein. As I said earlier, our platform has never been known to register domains after lookup, nor do we share this data with any third parties.

> We have confirmed that the registrant has no affiliation whatsoever with our staff or any of our partners.

> Further, to discuss the logs, the registrant added it to their cart immediately after searching for it, at 2021-03-03 00:18:13.566638 UTC. The OP searched for it but never added it to his cart, looking for it literally a minute before the person who actually registered it checked out (at 2021-03-03 00:17:38.875854 UTC).

> This was merely a coincidence, as we do process hundreds of thousands of domain searches per day.