DFINITY founder Dominic Williams alleged that a key component of NEAR Intents uses DFINITY technology without authorization and said the dispute could have legal implications, BlockBeats reported on Oct. 22.
Allegations concern threshold cryptography
Williams said NEAR used a former DFINITY employee and an open-source threshold-cryptography library to deploy work based on DFINITY’s ECDSA research. The research describes collaborative generation of ECDSA keys and signatures; Williams said it can make signing about three times faster without reducing security and underpins Chain Abstraction and Intents.
Williams also claimed the Internet Computer runs the algorithm on highly decentralized subnetworks, while NEAR allegedly uses about eight servers, and said GitHub activity showed NEAR trying to move to a slower algorithm after about two and a half years. NEAR had not publicly responded when the report was published. These are Williams’s allegations; BlockBeats did not independently verify the technical or intellectual-property claims.