The founder and lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which aims to simplify blockchain use by offering human-readable domain names, said he is “prepared to go to the mat” in an intellectual property dispute with rival Unstoppable Domains.
The comments, made by Nick Johnson in an interview with CoinDesk, come days after a feud broke out between the companies on X (formerly Twitter).
Johnson claimed in an “open letter” that Unstoppable had won a patent in January “based entirely on innovations developed by ENS” and that he now fears the rival company could use the advantage to his advantage. He said he is now considering challenging the patent after behind-the-scenes discussions failed to resolve the matter.
ENS is a domain name protocol that gives Ethereum users a name, such as ‘alice.eth’, in place of the long alphanumeric blockchain address associated with their crypto wallets. Unstoppable Domains does the same with different protocols.
Johnson says he’s simply trying to defend the work of ENS and the principle that code should be open source rather than proprietary.
“I think we’ve been pretty clear that this is important to us,” Johnson told CoinDesk. “And to be honest, it’s just a little bit difficult on a personal level. Because this is mainly code and specs that I wrote.”
In the November 16 exchange on Johnson wrote that “press releases are not legally binding.”
He challenged Unstoppable to issue an “unconditional and irrevocable patent pledge,” to “give legal weight” to the “PR commitment.”
The irrepressible CEO Matthew Gould responded to
Gould told CoinDesk in a statement: “We refute the claim that we stole ENS’s intellectual property. Instead, we patented the technology that we built ourselves and used for our system, which is different from the system that ENS built.”
The brouhaha goes to the heart of the blockchain industry’s original ethos, where a supposed reverence for open source code is usually seen as a driving force behind software as a public good. Others in the industry have deviated from this practice by patenting work and then enforcing the rights through the legal system.
According to Johnson’s reports, he approached Unstoppable to resolve the differences, but was unsuccessful.
The Web3 Domain Alliance says on its website that it is a “member-led, member-driven organization dedicated to improving the technology and public policy environments for users of blockchain naming services.”
Unstoppable is listed as one of dozens of ‘partner organizations’, although ENS is noticeably missing.
“It is of course difficult to know their intentions, but yes, just based on the signals they have given, I think they intend to use this and other patents as a way to establish their industry group as a de facto regulator leverage,” Johnson said in the interview.
“Given the environment, we may have to reconsider that and adopt an open patent license,” he said.
Johnson said he hopes the internet infrastructure of the future will be open and a “not-for-profit public good, rather than run by a for-profit company.”
In the statement to CoinDesk, Unstoppable’s Gould said that “the patent is directly related to the technology we deployed for our original “.crypto” registry on Ethereum and is different from our usage, including many inventions that make it easier for a centralized company like ours to manage a domain registration, for example, gasless transactions by paying for gas for users, which we have been offering for four years now. This is not something any other naming system did at the time.”
As for the Web3 Domain Alliance, Gould said they have “extended a Patent Non-Assertion pledge to members of the Web3 Domain Alliance, including ENS, demonstrating our commitment to collaborative and equitable development in the domain space.”
“The goal of the Web3 Domain Alliance is to advance the Web3 domain industry, prevent collisions and develop standards,” Gould said. “ENS’s request for us to make all our patents open source ignores the fact that we have already extended a cooperative hand through our non-assertion pledge, which ENS has yet to accept.”
Read more: What is the Ethereum Name Service? How ENS works and what it is used for
