Dragonfly Partner Responds to DFINITY’s Allegations of Technical Infringement: Relevant Patent Approved Only at End of July

Haseeb Qureshi, Partner at Dragonfly, responded to Dominic Williams—founder of DFINITY—who previously accused NEAR Intents of unauthorized use of threshold ECDSA signature technology. A screenshot shared by Qureshi shows the relevant patent was only granted in late July this year, having remained in “patent application” status for an extended period prior; NEAR Intents’ modifications to the algorithm occurred in September. Qureshi further noted that, based on Dominic Williams’ stated timeline, any alleged patent infringement would cover a window of roughly one month—and that the algorithm originally stems from an academic paper published under the CC BY license, which NEAR duly acknowledged and accommodated in its implementation.