DFINITY Founder Accuses NEAR Intents of Misappropriating Proprietary Technology

On October 22, DFINITY founder Dominic Williams pointed out that a key component of NEAR Intents is suspected of misappropriating DFINITY's proprietary technology, which raises legal issues. Williams stated that NEAR employed individuals who were dismissed by DFINITY in the summer of 2021 to rapidly deploy ECDSA-related work using an open-source threshold cryptography library. This solution originates from the DFINITY team's research on integrating chain key cryptography with Ethereum, and the related paper describes an algorithm for collaborative nodes to generate ECDSA public keys and sign them, which can increase signing speed by approximately three times without compromising security, serving as the foundation for the threshold signatures required for Chain Abstraction and Intents. Williams also mentioned that the Internet Computer runs this algorithm on a highly decentralized trustee subnet, while NEAR operates it on only about eight servers, making it difficult for outsiders to obtain more information. He believes that NEAR is rushing to launch Chain Abstraction and Intents, claiming to be self-developed, decentralized, and secure, but neither claim holds true. Furthermore, GitHub shows that NEAR is attempting to urgently downgrade to a slower algorithm after using it for about two and a half years. Williams pointed out that if they had sought cooperation on fair terms from the beginning, DFINITY could have shared the technology and required attribution. NEAR has not yet publicly responded to this matter.

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