Key Notes
- DFINITY founder Dominic Williams alleges unauthorized use of signing technology behind NEAR Chain Signatures.
- NEAR’s cited engineering work began in September and does not establish a licensing-driven emergency change.
- Williams later corrected his eight-node description, while NEAR reports seventeen operators and maintains a separate technical account.
DFINITY founder Dominic Williams has accused NEAR of using his organization’s threshold-signing technology without permission, opening a dispute over part of the infrastructure behind Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents. The Internet Computer founder alleges that NEAR used work licensed only for the Internet Computer for roughly two and a half years.
Williams set out the accusation in an October 22 X article, citing cryptographic research and NEAR’s public development records. Those sources establish a research connection and engineering changes, but do not by themselves establish that NEAR infringed intellectual-property rights.
Signing Technology at the Center
Chain Signatures lets NEAR accounts and smart contracts authorize transactions on other blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Rather than relying on a complete private key held by one server, multiparty computation distributes signing shares among participating nodes. Enough of them must cooperate to produce a valid signature.
That signing layer is distinct from the wider Intents system, which coordinates requests and their fulfillment. CoinScreamer previously explained the trading process in its Bitwise coverage and followed the Robinhood integration. The allegation concerns an underlying cryptographic component, rather than a claim that every part of those applications was developed by DFINITY.
Williams points to research by DFINITY cryptographers Jens Groth and Victor Shoup on ECDSA with additive key derivation and presignatures. Preparing signing material in advance can reduce the communication needed when a transaction is ready. He says DFINITY’s approach enables signing about three times faster than an alternative requiring three communication rounds.
That speed comparison is Williams’s claim. Round counts alone do not establish a threefold improvement in measured transaction latency or throughput across different deployments.
NEAR’s documentation openly links the Groth–Shoup paper when explaining additive key derivation. The research record dates the first submission to October 2021 and the latest listed revision to April 2022. Its publication under a Creative Commons license concerns the paper; it does not, on its own, resolve any separate implementation or patent-rights question.
The GitHub Changes Began in September
Williams characterizes NEAR’s development work as a hurried move away from DFINITY’s algorithm. The records he cites show that engineers were discussing an alternative before his October accusation.
A September 2 issue proposed combining presignature and signature work in the online phase, with benchmarking to test comparable performance and an aim of simplifying the system. A related pull request was merged on September 25, describing staged support and a fallback to the existing protocol during the transition.
The dates and stated engineering goals do not establish that licensing concerns motivated the work. A merged code change also does not, by itself, show exactly when every production node adopted a new signing path.
NEAR Describes Its Network; Williams Clarifies
An October 22 technical statement from NEAR, by Near One CTO Anton Astafiev and NEAR writer Mally Anderson, says Chain Signatures runs with 17 mainnet operators and an 11-node signing threshold. It says operations now run inside trusted execution environments using Intel TDX, with verification of the software and operations. These are the project’s descriptions of its design, rather than an independent security audit by CoinScreamer.
In a subsequent follow-up, Williams acknowledged that a dashboard showed 16 nodes run by different parties, correcting his earlier eight-server description. He also acknowledged that the described hardware protections could reduce risks if implemented and actively verified, while maintaining his core licensing allegation. His dashboard figure differs from the 17 operators reported in NEAR’s statement.
The NEAR statement addresses architecture and security, but does not directly settle Williams’s permission claim. His original article does not identify a filed lawsuit, court ruling or specific patent number. The public record reviewed therefore supports reporting an unresolved technology-rights dispute, without treating either infringement or an exploitable signing vulnerability as established.
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