Watching this ICP–NEAR feud, my biggest takeaway so far is this: everyone’s arguing about patents, when what they should really be concerned about is those 8 servers.
On October 22, Dominic Williams fired off accusations, saying that the threshold signature scheme used by NEAR Intents and Chain Signatures was a design DFINITY had created exclusively for ICP, and that a former employee fired by DFINITY in 2021 had taken it with them. NEAR had used it for more than two years without a license, and was now quietly replacing it on GitHub. He also threatened “civil and criminal legal consequences.”
And then? No lawsuit. NEAR hasn’t issued a direct response to this day. On social media, half the people are ICP fans posting “NEAR is finished,” while the other half are saying Old D is picking a fight again.
To put it bluntly, we’ve seen this routine all too often in crypto: threatening criminal charges but never actually filing a lawsuit. It looks more like a way to drum up attention for your own chain. The day before, people were sharing an engineer calling their Confidential Intents “snake oil”; the next day, it had escalated straight to accusations of stealing technology. The timing feels a little too deliberate. Kyle Chasse was right to ask whether this is a genuine beef or just marketing.
But don’t rush to take ICP’s side either. Williams also casually dropped this: NEAR’s setup apparently runs on just 8 servers. If that’s true, it’s a much bigger deal than who copied whom. If the signatures for your cross-chain assets rely on just 8 machines, how far are you from centralized custody? That’s what NEAR should be explaining—not the patent.
Let the lawyers argue over who copied whom. If you’re moving large sums through Intents, first find out exactly how many signing nodes are behind it.
#NEAR #ICP
On October 22, Dominic Williams fired off accusations, saying that the threshold signature scheme used by NEAR Intents and Chain Signatures was a design DFINITY had created exclusively for ICP, and that a former employee fired by DFINITY in 2021 had taken it with them. NEAR had used it for more than two years without a license, and was now quietly replacing it on GitHub. He also threatened “civil and criminal legal consequences.”
And then? No lawsuit. NEAR hasn’t issued a direct response to this day. On social media, half the people are ICP fans posting “NEAR is finished,” while the other half are saying Old D is picking a fight again.
To put it bluntly, we’ve seen this routine all too often in crypto: threatening criminal charges but never actually filing a lawsuit. It looks more like a way to drum up attention for your own chain. The day before, people were sharing an engineer calling their Confidential Intents “snake oil”; the next day, it had escalated straight to accusations of stealing technology. The timing feels a little too deliberate. Kyle Chasse was right to ask whether this is a genuine beef or just marketing.
But don’t rush to take ICP’s side either. Williams also casually dropped this: NEAR’s setup apparently runs on just 8 servers. If that’s true, it’s a much bigger deal than who copied whom. If the signatures for your cross-chain assets rely on just 8 machines, how far are you from centralized custody? That’s what NEAR should be explaining—not the patent.
Let the lawyers argue over who copied whom. If you’re moving large sums through Intents, first find out exactly how many signing nodes are behind it.
#NEAR #ICP