Recently, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Education Fund (DEF) submitted a more than 90-page petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requesting review of a patent owned by True Return Systems. The patent, granted in 2018, covers the process of linking off-chain data to the blockchain. True Return attempted to sell its patents as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but found no buyers, filing a lawsuit against DeFi protocols MakerDAO and Compound Finance in October, DEF legal director Amanda Tuminelli said.
DEF claimed that the technology in True Return's patent was not new when it was granted, citing examples of similar existing technologies such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and decentralized storage platforms Sia, Storj and Swarm. The purpose of DEF’s petition to the USPTO is to defend the ability to use and develop open source software, block any potential plans by True Return to sue crypto projects, and aid MakerDAO and Compound’s legal defense. True Return has three months to selectively respond to the application, and after six months, the USPTO must decide whether to continue examining the patent, of which it has 12 months to decide whether the patent should be revoked.
DEF claimed that the technology in True Return's patent was not new when it was granted, citing examples of similar existing technologies such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and decentralized storage platforms Sia, Storj and Swarm. The purpose of DEF’s petition to the USPTO is to defend the ability to use and develop open source software, block any potential plans by True Return to sue crypto projects, and aid MakerDAO and Compound’s legal defense. True Return has three months to selectively respond to the application, and after six months, the USPTO must decide whether to continue examining the patent, of which it has 12 months to decide whether the patent should be revoked.