DFINITY Founder Dominic Williams Accuses NEAR of Using Proprietary ECDSA Technology

A 2021 ECDSA Paper at the Center

A threshold ECDSA scheme that DFINITY cryptographers Jens Groth and Victor Shoup described in a 2021 paper, published openly on IACR ePrint, sits at the center of a dispute that went public on Thursday. DFINITY founder Dominic Williams, whose company develops the Internet Computer (ICP), published a long-form post on X at 13:31 UTC on October 22, accusing NEAR Protocol (NEAR) of taking a core component of its cross-chain products, Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents, from cryptographic research DFINITY licenses exclusively for ICP use. Williams wrote that the matter carries civil and criminal legal implications and argued a resolution must exist. He identified the presignature design in the Groth-Shoup work, which he said speeds up signing by roughly 3x, as the technology NEAR adopted. Threshold signing of this kind is what lets a NEAR user control Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts without managing a full private key on each chain.

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The scheme lets multiple machines jointly generate a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet address and produce signatures collaboratively without any single party holding the complete private key. NEAR's official documentation on additive key derivation links directly to the Groth-Shoup paper, a connection Williams read as evidence. He also recalled that DFINITY announced plans in May 2021 to integrate Ethereum through its chain-key cryptography and assembled a cryptographic team for that effort. ICP, he noted, runs threshold signatures on a trustless subnet of about 50 independent node operators, which he presented as the genuinely decentralized model. The claims are, so far, one side of the record. NEAR Protocol (NEAR) has not responded publicly at the time of writing, and the NEAR price slipped about 4.2% over the last 24 hours while the exchange of statements played out.

GitHub Records and the Decentralization Dispute

GitHub records give the engineering claims their first public anchors. Williams cited pull request #4503 in the NEAR MPC repository, merged on September 25, which added support for a Cait-Sith protocol variant enabling online presignatures; he read it as an urgent downgrade to a simplified version that signs roughly 3x slower. The related issue #4324 proposed evaluating the change on the stated grounds that a simpler system is easier to trust and maintain. Neither document mentions DFINITY, and whether legal concerns drove the shift cannot be confirmed from the record. Williams separately claimed that NEAR recruited a former DFINITY employee dismissed in 2021 to lead the relevant development and hired two DFINITY engineers; those personnel points rest on his account alone, unconfirmed by NEAR Protocol (NEAR) or the individuals named.

The decentralization dispute sharpened because NEAR answered it in near real time. Half an hour before Williams posted, the NEAR Protocol team published a technical article stating that mainnet MPC now runs 17 independent operators with an 11-of-17 threshold, all inside trusted execution environments. Williams put the signing network at roughly 8 servers. He added that DFINITY would have shared the technology on fair terms with attribution had NEAR proposed cooperation, and said he holds no personal grudge against NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, though he considered this episode a step too far. The commercial stakes are real. Chain Signatures launched in the first quarter of 2024 and underpin NEAR Intents, whose cumulative trading volume has passed $35 billion on NEAR's own figures, the protocol's principal growth engine of recent years, as our earlier look at its cross-chain swap volume showed. ICP community members had raised the citation question before, with one member posting as ajki76 questioning in September why NEAR credits DFINITY's mathematics while presenting the result as unprecedented. Yet the NEAR MPC code is open source under an MIT license and the papers are public; whether threshold signing, now standard infrastructure across cross-chain bridges and used by projects such as Lit Protocol, can be owned at all is the hardest question in the dispute.

No Filing, Only a Post

For now the dispute exists as a social post, not a docket entry: no complaint, motion or court filing from DFINITY appears in any public record, and NEAR has offered no formal reply. That gap defines where the two positions stand. Williams must point to a patent or a binding license if the accusation is to move from opinion into law, because an openly published paper and MIT-licensed code are, by default, free for anyone to build on. NEAR, for its part, faces reputational rather than legal exposure until a filing appears. A suit would give the broader altcoin market its first real precedent on how published cryptographic research may be cited; without one, this stays a fight over credit, not custody of the algorithm.