DFINITY Founder Dominic Williams: NEAR Misappropriated Proprietary Technology
Dominic Williams, founder of the Internet Computer project DFINITY, stated in a post that further investigation revealed that the key enabling component of NEAR Intents is actually misappropriated proprietary technology from DFINITY, and that the related actions involve legal issues.
He claimed that NEAR utilized personnel who were dismissed by DFINITY in the summer of 2021 and were involved in multiple attempts to harm the project, adding DFINITY's inventions to an open-source threshold cryptography library to quickly deploy their ECDSA-related work.
The solution originated from the team's research and development results for chain key cryptography and Ethereum integration, with related papers describing an algorithm for collaborative nodes to generate ECDSA public keys and signatures, which can increase signing speed by about three times without compromising security, serving as the basis for the threshold signatures required for Chain Abstraction and Intents.
He noted that the Internet Computer runs this algorithm on a highly decentralized trustee subnet, while NEAR reportedly runs it on only about 8 servers, making it difficult for outsiders to obtain more information.
Williams believes that NEAR is rushing to launch Chain Abstraction and Intents, claiming they are self-developed, decentralized, and secure, but that neither claim holds true.
He also mentioned that GitHub shows NEAR is attempting to urgently downgrade to a slower algorithm after using it for about two and a half years, stating that if they had sought cooperation on fair terms initially, DFINITY could have shared the technology and required attribution. NEAR has yet to publicly respond to this matter.
Amid the controversy over technology ownership, attention and capital are reassessing projects related to chain abstraction and Intents, with DFINITY's technological path benefiting from public claims, while NEAR faces reputational and compliance pressures due to a lack of response.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Dominic Williams leads DFINITY in developing the Internet Computer, initially focusing on chain key cryptography and Ethereum integration, forming a technological path that enhances efficiency through threshold signatures, with multiple papers publicly describing the algorithm details for collaborative nodes to generate ECDSA signatures.
The accusation against NEAR involves using personnel dismissed in 2021 and adding proprietary inventions to an open-source library for rapid deployment, with the motivation to assert the technological source of Chain Abstraction and Intents, while contrasting their highly decentralized subnet with NEAR's operation on about 8 servers.
Similar cases include public disputes over core algorithm ownership in open-source projects and legal claims by blockchain teams regarding technology transfer from former employees; currently, the expansion and control phase of chain abstraction is transitioning from technical demonstration to application implementation.
Essentially, this is a case of technological substitution, where threshold signatures shift from proprietary development to rapid adoption by external projects, with the mechanism being that open-source libraries reduce replication costs, making attribution and cooperation terms the focus of disputes, shifting pricing power from claimed self-development to verifiable technological sources and degrees of decentralization.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- Open-source libraries reduce replication costs
- Dismissed personnel carry technological paths
- Claims of self-development require verifiable sources