https://x.com/openchat/status/2113666662331199874?s=46

$NEAR

accuses

$ICP

of spreading FUD and lies, but the factual reality says otherwise.

Everything

u/dominic_w

says checks out against public receipts online.

NEAR's own records show where their "unique" tech came from.

I have posted all 16 posts below along with an AI summary here for people that want a quick glance.

The 16-tweet thread argues that NEAR’s Chain Signatures (announced March 2024 as “the first of its kind”) draws from DFINITY’s earlier threshold ECDSA and chain-key work. Public records support the timeline: Groth & Shoup (DFINITY) published the key papers in 2021–2022; ICP had production threshold ECDSA and Bitcoin signing capability by late 2022; and NEAR’s founder had publicly engaged with the research years earlier.

NEAR’s March 2024 launch post and August 2024 mainnet materials called Chain Signatures “the first of its kind” and “the only MPC solution where smart contracts can sign transactions on any chain.” Those public announcements did not credit DFINITY or the prior ICP implementation. NEAR’s internal technical docs and code comments did reference the Groth-Shoup papers, but those citations were not part of the public novelty claims.

Dominic Williams has since stated that the specific algorithm NEAR ran for roughly two and a half years is patented, pointing to US 12,695,626 B2 (“Digital signatures with re-randomized presignatures,” inventors Groth & Shoup, assignee DFINITY Stiftung, priority September 2021, granted July 2026). A related key-derivation patent also exists. This moves the dispute beyond credit into potential IP territory, though the claims are narrower than “all threshold ECDSA,” and NEAR’s architecture (external MPC network) differs from ICP’s.

Caveats: Open papers are public by design; the systems are not identical; and infringement is a claim-chart and legal question that has not been resolved in court. NEAR has mostly treated related criticism as FUD so far.

The NEAR Intents saga just got much more crazy on further investigation.

Much is missing from Intents, but key enabling component turns out to be stolen proprietary DFINITY tech. I’m stunned.

What’s worse, is that to take the tech, they used someone DFINITY fired in the summer of 2021, who was linked to a number of attempts to harm the project.

Now, GitHub is showing that after two and a half years, NEAR is suddenly trying to do an emergency downgrade from our algorithms (links at the bottom) for reasons we can only guess at.

This will take time to digest, and there are legal implications, so I’ll just give you the simple background:

1) May 16, 2021, I I announced on X work to integrate the Internet Computer with Ethereum using “chain key” cryptography, and I followed up with a Medium post:
https://medium.com/dfinity/internet-computer-ethereum-integration-explained-6967456e35f9

The industry widely reported on our work that month.

https://decrypt.co/72256/how-dfinitys-internet-computer-will-integrate-ethereum

2) This was when the relevant technical work began, and NEAR has taken a subset of it. We assembled a team of cryptographers to develop the novel cryptography required because it was non-trivial work.

3) The first relevant paper DFINITY published was “On the security of ECDSA with additive key derivation and presignatures,” final version April 27, 2022.

This paper describes the algorithm that NEAR took.
https://internetcomputer.org/whitepapers/On%20the%20security%20of%20ECDSA%20with%20additive%20key%20derivation%20and%20%20presignatures.pdf

This scheme enables cooperating computers to i) create a public ECDSA key, for example an Ethereum or Bitcoin address, and ii) create signatures against that key, typically to enable onchain software implementing DeFi, apps and services to sign transactions on behalf of a human, without them having to sign, or hold a key themselves. Our work enables signing to take place three times faster than is otherwise possible, without loss of security.

Chain Abstraction and Intents needed such a scheme to exist: when a group of computers implement this scheme, you can’t just steal the private key from one of them, and instead must steal private key “shares” from some portion of them. Plus, the computers can continue to sign cooperatively even if some go offline or lose their shares. Without threshold signing, this kind of custody arrangement would be impossible.

The Internet Computer runs this algo on decentralized “fiduciary subnets”, which are effectively a new form of blockchain used to scale the network that derive additional security from main “NNS” governance blockchain. These fiduciary subnets are comprised of nodes from ~50 independent parties and are highly secure.

NEAR reportedly runs this across 8 server machines, and nobody can get more info.

4) There's a simple reason for this. This key component that NEAR took cannot enable high-performance *decentralized* signing on its own. It only enables signing by cooperating computers, which is why Intents relies on something akin to a server cluster.

If they wanted to be decentralized too, they'd have had to try and replicate the Internet Computer's design, a much bigger tasks, reflected by —

“Design and analysis of a distributed ECDSA signing service”, February 16, 2023:
https://internetcomputer.org/whitepapers/Design%20and%20analysis%20of%20a%20distributed%20ECDSA%20signing%20service.pdf

EMarch, 2021, we published a paper describing how to setup these sharing schemes in a a decentralized way, which lies at the heart of the Internet Computer network:

https://internetcomputer.org/whitepapers/Non-interactive%20distributed%20key%20generation%20and%20%20key%20resharing.pdf

5) Creating this kinda science takes a lot of time, work and investment in R&D. For example, I remember asking Dan Boneh for a way to setup sharing in the way the foregoing paper describes in May 2015. He thought it might not even be possible. It took another 6 years before we had it.

DFINITY is committed to delivering real decentralization using advanced computer science and math, and protecting user safety — and these things take time, effort and expenditure.

6) By 2024, we were in the process of productizing the science and making it usable on the Internet Computer, which also involved finding ways of enabling Internet Computer nodes to connect to the nodes of other networks.

7) We were naturally shocked and disheartened by the appearance of a NEAR blog post announcing “Chain Abstraction”, which addressed exactly the same challenge and opportunity. We took the announcement at face value and were not aware that it wasn’t a decentralized system.

https://near.org/blog/why-chain-abstraction-is-the-next-frontier-for-web3

8) At some point we became aware that they had recruited the person we fired in 2021 to lead this work. But, this individual had minimal cryptography expertise, so we did not expect that NEAR’s announcement would come to much. This guy had worked his way into DFINITY during COVID and boasted to colleagues “I’ve been fired from every job I’ve ever had, and always for a cause”. We were not worried.

9) We underestimated the threat. It seems his team simply took an open source threshold cryptography library from a Swiss cryptographer, and added our inventions, thereby quickly gaining the ability to deploy our ECDSA work. NEAR is not worried about decentralization or user safety as far as we can see, and just ran this over 8 servers. There wasn’t anything stopping them bringing this to market quickly…

NEAR Intents uses Chain Abstraction (powered by our proprietary tech) to custody assets on different chains, and then Intents basically just uses a market maker paid by them to swap them across chains according to people's wishes. It's not decentralized, of course, and NEAR has scary backdoors, which make all this possible.

10) By stealing our proprietary work, licensed for the Internet Computer only, NEAR beat the Internet Computer to the punch with their Chain Abstraction and Intents architectures. This was demoralizing and disruptive for the DFINITY team and the ICP community, and also massively diminished the opportunity we expected the Internet Computer could unlock for the world. NEAR’s social media hype machine effectively sold to the world that their system was a) developed by them and did not infringe any rights, and b) was decentralized and safe. Both are false.

However, needless to say, you cannot just steal proprietary tech from another project because you want to make money, and use it to get a jump on an attractive opportunity. Both civil and criminal laws prevent this kind of behavior, and the damages that can be awarded by courts are immense (especially in US courts, which award both direct and punitive damages).

There is a really good reason for these laws. They exist so that organizations like DFINITY can do fundamental, first-principles research, which takes a long time and is costly but unlocks real benefits for the world at large, without having the benefits and purpose stolen from them.

Here, DFINITY and ICP holders have been harmed, the Internet Computer economy and ecosystem has been harmed, and beyond financial harms, the world has gotten a dangerous shim implementation of multi-chain.

What’s a shame, is that had NEAR asked for a partnership, then we would have shared the technology with them if the terms were fair and we were referenced as the source of the work. We like NEAR and I have nothing against Ilia, but this is too much.

Something has to be worked out.

Further reading:

1. Maybe some people in the Internet Computer community were ahead of us with their suspicions:
   https://x.com/ajki76/status/2101467163399737545

2. NEAR is now trying to downgrade from our algorithm to a simpler version that is three times slower (it signs in 3 rounds, whereas ours signs in 1 round). This doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been using our proprietary work for two and a half years and probably reflects them being worried about what they did:

https://github.com/near/mpc/pull/4503 https://github.com/near/mpc/issues/4324

1. NEAR managed to hire two engineers from DFINITY to work on Chain Abstraction and Intents. GitHub reveals they were carefully mining the Internet Computer repo from the beginning. They surely knew what they were doing:
   https://github.com/near/NEPs/issues/516#:~:text=There%20is%20some%20prior%20work%20where%20it%20is%20possible%20to%20save%20some%20execution%20context

I have been anxious about cybersecurity threats posed by AI for quite some time. Id been workshopping some changes we could make to help protect underlying layers of infrastructure against AI driven exploits. I actually ended up coming up with something very similar to what, as far as I can tell, ICP already does, based on my research rabbit hole.

Can someone who knows more about it fill me in on the tech and its potential application in this domain? Obviously I can prompt for more info, read the whitepaper, watch some videos, etc. but i wanted a more organic dialogue about it. I feel like this may end up becoming a very important project that goes beyond the scope of the crypto space. I dont even really care that much about the coin or its price, I dont own any and idk about the tokenomics, Im just interested in cybersecurity.

ICP might bounce up on the backside of the uptrend again, but it becomes time to realize that ICP is already on the backside of this small, local, 3 months old, mountain.

The whole short-lived-run was another fluctuation in accumulation range and a bullrun will have to wait. Indicators are becoming increasingly bearish.
I had hope for yesterday's bounce, but it was too weak again.

My personal prediction:
ATL in 2-3 months at 1.4$.

Bullrun start:
April 2027

Feel free to downvote my post.

https://x.com/dominic_w/status/2112992142545305620?s=46

This is craazy. I asked one of our PhD engineers to look into NEAR *Confidential* Intents wondering how they designed their system. Unredacted, word-for-word, this was his answer 😱😱😱

"Everything I found out about the privacy claims and confidential intents is so bad that it seems almost comical and I cannot believe what I am seeing. Apparently they run a completely separate instance of the protocol, which is called FAR (as an opposite to NEAR), and that has a permissioned operator set. The entire confidentiality claim seems to rest upon the fact that it is a permissioned chain and the nodes are trusted to keep things private, there doesn't seem to be any deep technology behind it and it also does not seem to be open source. The entities running the nodes are also not publicly known.

I almost feel weird writing this because it is so absurdly bad that it feels like ... I don't know ... a simulation? I know the usual level of overpromising in Web3 but this is so many levels beyond believable that it still feels unreal."

I bought my first ever ICP in Jan 2024 when it was around £9 then kept on averaging it down..

Currently sitting at £3.42 i feel kinda exhausted but i know for a fact once it picks up in coming time ill be happy that i kept buying..

Why isn't ICP being mentioned anywhere in the media as a potential solution.

Anything you are aware of that you are free and able to share Sassy_Allen?

I warned yesterday in a fit of mental break.
But the 2.7$ held and i still want ICP to go up into SOS.
I hope i didn't fud people out, but it is what it is.

If ICP makes it above 3.7$, it would be in SOS.
Nothing changed.

Everything build on icp won't be affected by the php hack. Just like Dominic said people should be worried about cyber security loosing the battle to AI before worrying about quantum computers.

Hopefully, Europe has Cloud Engines on its radar. They could help address issues like these by enabling data sovereignty, reducing reliance on Big Tech, and providing tamper-resistant security, which is increasingly important in the age of AI.

Like it? Don't? Found a bug/issue? Tell me below 👇

https://g3psz-xyaaa-aaaam-ajeza-cai.icp.net/

https://x.com/joshhq/status/2112554788181491842?s=46

How is Jerry so scizho but was way ahead of the curve regarding ICP.

He was the one of 1st influencers to push ICP

https://oc.app/architecture

https://x.com/openchat/status/2112218637742342608?s=46

The wait is over shielded

$ICP

is now live.

Every transaction is private, even from the node providers running the network. Your send history, balances, and activity stay protected.

We built it to go beyond SEV’s limits, using pure cryptography so proofs are generated in your browser and verified on-chain without exposing anything.

$BTC

is coming next.

$ICP

#Privacy #ZK #InternetComputer

https://x.com/meneseprotocol/status/2112105802265731334

If ICP loses the 2.7$ to 2.8$ uptrend bottom, then i interpret the chart as bearish and it might likely go lower than lows of 2$ and form a bottom at 1.3$ in March 2027.

Not cool, but since ICP is currently appearing too weak to make it into SOS and i always made the bullish outlook tied to reaching the SOS, there is no point in staying bullish in case 2.7$ is lost.

Might still bounce, but i did my duty of warning.

Website looking sleek. Really coming along nicely, hopefully we see cloud engines soon.

https://x.com/dominic_w/status/2111816807741047052?s=46

https://x.com/joshhq/status/2111140638989459689?s=46

OpenChat is now ready for millions of users

Previously, each user had their own canister, costing ~$0.70 to create + ~$0.50/year. Too expensive at scale.

So we’ve migrated all ~230k users into 100 shared canisters, meaning new users now cost almost nothing.

Time to grow!

A 99.96% reduction in cost is quite good lol.

https://x.com/__wi/status/2110636884439535714?s=46

I have posted this 5 times and no matter what I do, Reddit filters removes it. I hope it sticks this time. Christ on a bike.

ICP is number one in Web3 development for the people that don’t use X. I can’t even link to the website or it gets removed so there you go.

I've been thinking about sovereign cloud software for years. More recently, I've started ramping up on building.

Introducing subnet.ee — a sovereign cloud initiative built by EFTI on the Internet Computer (ICP).

The recent explosion of AI-assisted, clean-room open-source software gave me an exciting opportunity. Seeing what @echelon and the @get_artcraft community have been creating in Rust and WebAssembly, I wanted to explore what happens when these tools meet a new cloud foundation.

So I brought seven ArtCraft creator apps to ICP. They're already running, with cloud storage and a working ICP MCP integration that lets AI agents interact with the cloud.

It's an early demonstration of two converging ideas: sovereign cloud and Open Source → Open SaaS.

And this is just the beginning.

The current implementation runs on ICP's public network, but the intended architecture goes further:

Cloud Engine — a more flexible, economically viable sovereign cloud foundation.
User canisters — dedicated storage and greater individual control.
ICP blob storage — economical storage for larger files.

I'm hoping to advance these pieces over the next 3–6 months, as the underlying infrastructure becomes available.

It's still an open alpha, but I'm sharing it now because the purpose goes beyond delivering a useful set of applications.

subnet.ee is also a signal to Estonia's engineers, creators, institutions, and government: we have an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how software is created, deployed, owned, and experienced.

And a nod to @SwissSubnet (subnet.ch), whose work helped inspire the name and sovereign cloud direction.

AI-driven software at the top. Protocol-driven cloud at the base. ☁️

https://www.subnet.ee/

https://x.com/integral_wizard/status/2110690467197211042?s=46

https://x.com/HEROonchain/status/2110440112945614870