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DFINITY Founder:NEAR Intents key component allegedly misappropriated its proprietary technology
BlockBeats reported that October 22, the Internet Computer project DFINITY founder Dominic Williams stated in a post that, following further investigation,NEAR Intents's key enabling component had in fact misappropriated DFINITY's proprietary technology, and said the matter involves legal issues. He said NEAR used an individual who was dismissed by 2021 in the summer of DFINITY and had allegedly been involved in multiple attempts to harm the project, adding DFINITY's invention to an open-source threshold cryptography library in order to rapidly deploy its ECDSA-related work. The solution originated from the team's research for chain-key cryptography and Ethereum integration. The related paper describes an algorithm enabling collaborating nodes to generate ECDSA public keys and signatures, which can increase signing speed by approximately times without compromising security, and serves as the threshold-signature foundation required by Chain Abstraction and Intents.
He said that Internet Computer runs this algorithm on a highly decentralized trusted subnet, whereas NEAR reportedly operates on only approximately 8 servers, with little additional information publicly available. Williams believes NEAR used this to launch Chain Abstraction and Intents ahead of others, claiming externally that they were independently developed, decentralized, and secure, though neither claim holds.
He also said GitHub shows that NEAR is attempting to urgently downgrade to a slower algorithm after using it for approximately 2 and a half years. He said that had it sought cooperation on fair terms from the outset,DFINITY could have shared the technology and required attribution. At present,NEAR has not publicly responded to this matter.
Original link https://m.theblockbeats.info/flash/373248