WIPO had previously found that Uniswap.com was used in bad faith.
Hayden Adams has claimed that Sam Bankman-Fried paid seven figures for the Uniswap.com domain. Adams said Uniswap Labs had earlier rejected the original owner’s seven-figure asking price.
According to Adams, Bankman-Fried later acquired the domain and redirected it to a Uniswap fork. He described the move as a way to “flex” or mess with the company. The domain later became part of a WIPO dispute.
Inside the Uniswap.com Dispute
According to the WIPO decision, Uniswap Labs filed its complaint back on May 18, 2021, against the registered holder of Uniswap.com. Interestingly, the domain had originally been registered on July 30, 2000. However, the respondent’s legal representative said it acquired the domain on April 7, 2021. This was after the company had already secured trademark rights for UNISWAP.
At the time of the case, the domain was redirecting visitors to a page on SushiSwap, which the panel identified as operating in the same financial market as Uniswap. The respondent later changed the domain to a website promoting the trade of sea urchin, using the Japanese term “uni,” after the complaint was filed.
The respondent denied having prior knowledge of Uniswap Labs. WIPO, however, rejected those arguments. In fact, the panel found that the respondent had been aware of the company before acquiring the domain and that evidence showed it considered the company a rival.
The panel also verified through the Wayback Machine that Uniswap.com had redirected visitors to a SushiSwap page around the time the complaint was filed. WIPO concluded that the use of the domain created a likelihood of confusion with Uniswap Labs’ trademark and did not qualify as a “legitimate” use. It was also found that the domain had been acquired and used in “bad faith.”
Four months later, WIPO ordered the domain to be transferred to Uniswap Labs. Importantly, the decision does not identify the disgraced FTX founder as the respondent or establish that he acquired the domain.
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SBF’s Role in SushiSwap
SushiSwap had originally launched as a fork of Uniswap during the rapid DeFi growth in 2020. Bankman-Fried was already involved with it several months before the Uniswap.com dispute. In September 2020, its creator, Chef Nomi, handed control of the project to Bankman-Fried during a governance crisis. This came after Chef Nomi withdrew tokens from the project’s developer fund.
As reported by CryptoPotato, Bankman-Fried then helped oversee SushiSwap’s migration before control gradually shifted to a multisignature setup.
