ENS chief accuses Unstoppable Domains of patent theft

The lead developer of the domain-name service ENS, Nick Johnson, published an open letter to Unstoppable Domains (UD), in which he accused competitors of patent theft.

In January of this year, Unstoppable Domains was granted its first patent, number US11558344, Resolving Blockchain Domains. This patent is based entirely on innovations that ENS developed and contains no novel innovations of its own.

— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) November 16, 2023

According to Johnson, in January UD received its first patent, titled ‘Resolving Blockchain Domains,’ which is based entirely on open-source ENS technologies.

The company subsequently continued to file other developments, including a recent application for a reservation mechanism similar to Sunrise Phase, which had been common to the entire DNS community.

Subsequently UD issued a press release, promising to transfer its first patent to the ‘Alliance Web3-domains’ — an industry group formed and run by Unstoppable Domains.

‘We value the sentiment behind this, but unfortunately press releases have no legal force,’ noted Johnson.

A spokesperson for ENS urged UD to back up its claims with an ‘unconditional and irrevocable patent commitment’.

The developer initially did not object to the use of the project’s technologies, since they were already publicly available. However, UD’s actions raised questions about their good faith.

If the company ultimately refuses to transfer the patent to the Association, ENS Labs will challenge the patent application in court, Johnson warned.

‘ENS remains committed to open innovation in Web3. We believe in building open-for-all, scalable and durable systems on which the blockchain-domain ecosystem can be strengthened,’ he concluded.

Earlier this August, the Polygon Zero accused Matter Labs of stealing the project’s code. According to the statement, in a recent update from the competitor named Boojum, fully copied parts of the SNARK Plonky2 protocol were found.