The NEAR vs. ICP Dfinity Public Chain Dispute Explained

Over the past two days (October 21–23), DFINITY (ICP) founder Dominic Williams launched a 48-hour barrage of attacks on X against NEAR Protocol and its core product NEAR Intents (intent-based trading and chain abstraction)—escalating from initial doubts about the technical merits all the way to accusations of "corporate espionage, poaching, and plagiarism of proprietary cryptographic algorithms," even threatening civil and criminal lawsuits with a claimed "70%–85% win rate."

Many onlookers only saw the two communities trading insults and even issuing meme coins to mock each other, but once you strip away the emotional noise, every point of contention in this spat lands squarely on the pressure points of Web3 today: "academic geek" versus "engineering pragmatist," and "the boundary between academic open source and commercial moats."

The following breaks down the real logic behind this drama across four core dimensions of the clash.

1. The Trigger: The Privacy Mechanism Dispute—"Snake Oil" or "Incremental Engineering Delivery"?

The first round of exchanges (October 21–22) centered on NEAR's recently promoted privacy feature, Confidential Intents.

• Dominic's (#DFINITY) Attack Point: Selling "permissioned sharding + TEE" as cryptographic privacy is false advertising (Snake Oil)Dominic posted his own PhD engineer's review conclusions on NEAR's confidential intents, and the firepower was intense. He pointed out that NEAR's so-called confidential privacy transactions do not actually use genuine hardcore cryptography under the hood, but instead rely on an independent permissioned validator shard plus a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment)-based cross-chain bridge. Simply put, users' transaction privacy depends entirely on "trusting that these node operators won't peek or misbehave," and there is even potential backdoor risk.
• NEAR Official and Community Counterattack: The Earth-Shattering Secret You Spent Forever Researching Is on the First Page of Our Public DocsFacing the accusations, NEAR's response was devastating: NEAR had defined Confidential Intents from the very beginning as an "opt-in privacy feature" (primarily for preventing MEV front-running and for enterprise-grade multisig treasury management, not a mixer), and the design of "using permissioned validator shards + TEE bridges" was spelled out in black and white in NEAR's official public documentation long ago.

The community immediately went into full mockery mode—one developer joked: "The conclusion DFINITY's PhD spent ages digging through code to reach turns out to be just a re-reading of NEAR's public docs. It's like a Michelin chef researching for ages and finally announcing to the world that he's discovered ovens get hot (you have to admit, this verbal attack really stings)."

NEAR also took the opportunity to jab back: the "armchair critics" obsessed with some perfect technical ideal will never be satisfied, while the core of engineering delivery is getting real scenarios working first. The NEAR community even casually launched a meme coin called IKP to mock ICP as "a has-been public chain clinging to relevance through marketing."

2. Escalation: The Rashomon of Underlying Cryptography—"Plagiarism, Poaching, and Infringement"

After the first wave of attacks backfired into ridicule, Dominic Williams dropped a second wave of heavy blows from the evening of October 22 to October 23, escalating the debate from "which technical approach is superior" to "intellectual property theft and legal action." His accusations centered on three points:

1. Core Algorithm "Freeloading" Accusation (Threshold ECDSA Presigning):Dominic claimed that after deep investigation, the most core component supporting NEAR Intents and chain abstraction (Chain Signatures, which let users directly control BTC and ETH accounts without managing multi-chain private keys) used, without authorization, DFINITY's proprietary algorithm from a 2022 paper—Additive Key Derivation & Presigning. This scheme allows multiple devices to collaboratively generate addresses and sign without any one holding the full private key, boosting signing speed by roughly 3x. Dominic stressed that the technology was developed specifically for ICP's integration with Bitcoin and Ethereum at the time, and the license was limited to use on the Internet Computer (ICP) network only. He also accused NEAR of recently trying to downgrade the algorithm back to a slower version on GitHub to avoid risk.
2. Confidential Key Derivation (CKD) Colliding with vetKeys:Dominic further pointed out that NEAR's 2025 Confidential Key Derivation (CKD) is highly similar in underlying principle to DFINITY's vetKeys, a proprietary technology launched back in 2023.
3. "Former Employee Leak and Poaching" Accusation:Dominic unilaterally alleged that NEAR not only hired a former employee who was fired by DFINITY in the summer of 2021 for similar misconduct to lead the development of this cross-chain signing system, but also poached two engineers from DFINITY.

Objectively, the most intriguing "legal and industry paradox" here is:

NEAR's MPC (multi-party computation) code itself is released under the open-source MIT License, and the funniest part is that NEAR's own official documentation introducing this technology originally included a link to DFINITY's 2022 public academic paper.

This raises an ultimate question the crypto industry has yet to see a legal precedent for: Can the algorithmic ideas in a cryptographic paper already published in academia be "privatized and monopolized" by a single public chain foundation? Threshold signing is now standard equipment for cross-chain infrastructure (including Lit Protocol and others), and without hard evidence of software code plagiarism or trade secret theft, going to court solely on the basis of "the algorithm logic originated from a paper I published" is extremely difficult to sustain in the open-source world—it looks more like a public opinion pressure campaign to win "authorship rights over technical orthodoxy."

3. Mutual Exposure of Decentralization Credentials: "8 Servers" VS "17-Node MPC + AWS Dependence"

Beyond intellectual property, both sides also stripped each other's decentralization down to the bare essentials:

• DFINITY's Offensive Line: Dominic attacked NEAR's chain abstraction signing network as not truly decentralized at all, barely holding together early on with "roughly 8 servers"; once compromised or colluding, the cross-chain custodied assets would face catastrophe. Meanwhile, the ICP community accused NEAR's front-end application layer of heavy dependence on centralized cloud services like AWS, creating single-point-of-failure risk (while ICP's pitch is full-stack on-chain hosting, with even front-end web pages running inside Canister containers).
• NEAR's Precise Counterattack: Dramatically, just half an hour before Dominic's long post went out, NEAR officially and very subtly preemptively published a technical long-form article, loudly announcing that its mainnet multi-party computation (MPC) nodes had expanded to 17 independent operators, using an 11/17 signing threshold, all running within hardware-level Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). This "predicting your prediction" move directly shut down the "8 servers" talking point.

4. The Essence: Why Did $ICP Dominic Lose His Composure at This Particular Moment?

Anyone who's spent enough time in capital markets understands that when big shots personally enter the fray, the surface is about code and papers, but the underlying layer is always the battle for liquidity, ecosystem position, and valuation pricing power.

Put the fundamentals of the two public chains side by side as of October 2026, and you'll immediately understand why Dominic is seething:

In Summary: A Collision Between "the Scientist with a Heavy Sword and No Edge" and "the Agile Product Packager"

Many projects claiming Tech DNA aren't actually Tech, but to be fair, both DFINITY and NEAR are teams with genuine hardcore engineering foundations in the blockchain industry. It's just that the two have taken vastly different evolutionary paths:

• DFINITY (ICP) is a classic "cryptographic fundamentalist": even with a sparse audience, it will spend years grinding out the purest threshold signatures, full-stack decentralized containers, and vetKeys. But in a financial market where attention is extremely scarce, excessive obsession with underlying perfectionism often means missing the window for ecosystem explosion. When Dominic sees his team's painstakingly developed 2022 presigning algorithm directly taken by NEAR next door and assembled with TEE into "NEAR Intents," which then racked up $35.6 billion in trading volume within a year and saw its price buck the trend with a 5% surge, that anger of "I planted the tree with my own sweat, and you picked the fruit and became more popular than me" is entirely understandable.
• NEAR is a classic "pragmatic product manager": no matter who first published the algorithm in a paper, as long as it's open-source and usable, it will rapidly assemble "MPC + permissioned sharding + TEE" into the cross-chain intent trading (Intents) and AI staking framework that institutions and retail need most. Even if there were only 8 nodes early on, even if TEE was needed as a transitional measure, get the capital and trading volume running first, then upgrade the nodes to 17 while running.

Borrowing a game theory lens, this dispute most likely won't actually be settled in court (because claiming exclusive monopoly over published cryptographic papers is extremely difficult to achieve legally); its equilibrium point will instead land on the two sides' community ecosystem positions: for DFINITY, ripping open this war of words may have earned it the label of "clout-chasing marketing," but at least it got the market to notice ICP's hard strength in threshold signatures and real-time throughput again; for NEAR, as long as no real private key security incident occurs, this kind of "pixel-level technical scrutiny" from a competitor's founder ironically becomes a free advertising catalyst for NEAR Intents' $35.6 billion in trading volume.

To further intuitively understand the NEAR Intents architecture at the center of this storm, its privacy transaction logic, and its co-founder's own words, you can watch Illia Polosukhin explaining NEAR Intents, privacy, and quantum-resistant security, in which NEAR's co-founder happens to give the most direct official perspective on the cross-chain intent routing and privacy design at the heart of this controversy.

Objectively speaking, ICP's excessively high valuation and coin price at the project's outset, along with its very heavy bagholders, also indirectly contributed to its years of sustained slump. But as an airdrop participant, ICP's 2018 airdrops of hundreds to thousands of dollars per email address are something the #Crypto world is unlikely to see again.

My personal feeling about ICP is that it's always been just a breath short,you say it doesn't do marketing—it often invests heavily in major events—but the product is just hard to use. There isn't even a good compatible wallet that makes operating the ICP chain feel like operating EVM or SOLANA $SOL.

ICP hasn't escaped any of the common ailments of technical projects—the same applies to Algorand, Hbar, and Conflux, though after Algorand's CEO change, who knows how it'll go this time. As an early participant in $Algo, Near, and ICP simultaneously, I feel Er Gouzi's [Algorand's] CEO changes are the most frequent, its tech the most hardcore, and its market game the weakest. ICP sits in the middle, while NEAR, with the Nvidia Jensen Huang connection and the Google connection, is relatively better off.

 $Near's overall strategic planning is clearly pragmatic, and at this juncture it can more quickly integrate with #AI and #Agent—that's a very valuable point.

This content is for informational and research reference only and does not constitute any investment, trading, or financial advice. Analysis & Polish & Formatting: UniPublisher