DFINITY Founder: NEAR Intents Key Component Allegedly Misappropriates Proprietary Technology

BlockBeats news, October 22 - Dominic Williams, founder of the Internet Computer project DFINITY, posted that further investigation reveals NEAR Intents' key enabling component is actually misappropriated DFINITY proprietary technology, and stated that the related actions involve legal issues. He claimed that NEAR used personnel who were dismissed by DFINITY in the summer of 2021 and had been involved in multiple attempts to harm the project, adding DFINITY's inventions to an open-source threshold cryptography library to rapidly deploy its ECDSA-related work. The solution stems from the team's research and development for chain-key cryptography and Ethereum integration; the related paper describes an algorithm for collaborative nodes to generate ECDSA public keys and sign, which can increase signing speed by about three times without reducing security, and is the threshold signature foundation required for Chain Abstraction and Intents.

He stated that the Internet Computer runs this algorithm on a highly decentralized trusted subnet, while NEAR is said to run it on only about 8 servers, making it difficult for outsiders to obtain more information. Williams believes NEAR used this to preemptively launch Chain Abstraction and Intents, claiming externally that it was self-developed, decentralized, and secure, but neither claim holds.

He also stated that GitHub shows NEAR is trying to urgently downgrade to a slower algorithm after about two and a half years of use, and that if cooperation had been sought on fair terms at the time, DFINITY could have shared the technology and required attribution. NEAR has not yet made a public response on the matter.