According to reports from crypto.news, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has revealed that Sam Bankman-Fried paid seven figures for Uniswap.com after Uniswap rejected the seller's price. In a September 21 post on X, Adams claimed that Bankman-Fried later paid the declined amount and redirected the domain toward a fork of the Uniswap protocol. The dispute began when Uniswap.com appeared to send visitors to SushiSwap, a competing decentralized exchange platform created as a fork of Uniswap. Contemporary reporting from The Block documented the redirect in May 2021, when the identity of the domain owner was not publicly known. As reported by BlockBeats, Adams stated that the 'malicious use' of the domain became the basis for Uniswap's legal team to ultimately obtain the domain for free, though he did not disclose the specific legal proceedings or timing of the transaction.
As reported by crypto.news, a three-member World Intellectual Property Organization panel ordered Uniswap.com transferred to Uniswap Labs on September 3, 2021, after finding bad-faith domain use. The panel reviewed a screenshot dated May 18, 2021, and checked archived versions of Uniswap.com through the Wayback Machine, showing pages from May resolving to a SushiSwap webpage. The respondent, identified as Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC / Future XXX of Hong Kong, argued that SushiSwap was an open-source derivative of the Uniswap protocol and disputed whether the redirect had initially been established. However, the panel rejected these arguments after reviewing additional evidence. The panel found credible signs that the respondent knew about Uniswap Labs before buying the name and treated the company as a competitor, while also finding the respondent failed to deal with evidence that undercut an earlier claim of ignorance.
According to crypto.news, the WIPO panel determined that using the Uniswap name for a domain did not become permissible simply because the underlying software was open source. Uniswap Labs held registered rights to the UNISWAP trademark, and the panel found the domain identical to that mark. The panel determined that redirecting users to SushiSwap did not qualify as bona fide use of the domain and created a high risk of implied affiliation with Uniswap Labs. Registration records show that Uniswap.com itself was first registered on July 30, 2000, years before Hayden Adams created the Uniswap protocol, with the respondent acquiring the domain on April 7, 2021. The panel's decision emphasized that 'ordinary people do not parse entity charts. They parse the word in the address bar,' making the visual difference between the original and fork potentially confusing to users.
As reported by crypto.news, more than five years after the dispute, Uniswap.com now redirects directly to the official Uniswap application at app.uniswap.org. A live check of the domain on September 21 confirmed the redirect. Uniswap Labs' current trademark guidelines state that third parties should not use UNISWAP, UNI or UNISWAP LABS trademarks in domain names or create names that could falsely suggest affiliation. The company says it enforces its trademark rights to protect users, with its current support directory still identifying Uniswap.org as the official website and app.uniswap.org as its trading interface. The domain story takes on new significance given recent legal developments, as Bankman-Fried faces steeper problems today after a jury convicted the FTX founder of fraud in November 2023 and a judge ordered 25 years in prison plus an $11 billion forfeiture. A petition to the Supreme Court remains his last open door.
