Odaily Report: Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi has publicly responded to DFINITY founder Dominic Williams' patent infringement allegations against NEAR Intents. Dominic Williams previously claimed that NEAR Intents' chain abstraction feature used DFINITY's threshold ECDSA signature technology—which is licensed only for the Internet Computer—without authorization, and alleged that the work was driven in part by an individual who was fired by DFINITY in 2021.
Haseeb Qureshi questioned the timing basis of the allegation, noting that the relevant patent was not granted until late July of this year, while NEAR Intents modified the relevant algorithm in September. According to the timeline described by Dominic Williams, the window of time after the patent was granted that is relevant to the dispute may be only about one month. Before a patent is formally granted by the patent office, it remains in the application stage, and actions taken prior to grant cannot be directly deemed patent infringement.
In addition, the relevant algorithm was initially published in an academic paper under a CC BY license, and NEAR cited that paper in its implementation. Haseeb Qureshi questioned whether it is reasonable for Dominic Williams to choose to publicly accuse NEAR of patent infringement under such circumstances. The core of the dispute involves the timing of the patent grant, the basis for the use of the relevant technology, and whether NEAR's specific implementation constitutes infringement. At present, the above statements remain the respective public positions of both parties.
