ENS Labs, the team behind the critical piece of wallet linking infrastructure Ethereum Name Service, has finally settled with its would-be challenger Manifold Finance over access to the all important eth.link domain name.
As part of the settlement, ENS has apparently agreed to a non-disparagement clause with Manifold, restricting what it can say publicly about the 18-month legal battle over the domain name, which served as a critical gateway between Web3 and Web2. But just because ENS can’t comment, doesn’t mean I can’t.
This is an excerpt from The Node newsletter, a daily roundup of the most pivotal crypto news on CoinDesk and beyond. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
Manifold is a middleware blockchain firm that most people have only heard of because of the now nearly-resolved lawsuit involving ENS. While the project certainly had a legal claim to eth.link after paying $852,000 in a Dynadot auction in 2022, the better move would have been to simply relinquish control over the domain after discovering the circumstances under which it was put up for sale.
See also: ENS Token Jumps 50% as Vitalik Buterin Hails It as ‘Super Important’
“http://eth.link was just sniped by us,” Manifold wrote on Twitter/X in 2022. It’s not clear if the company ever actually took possession of the eth.link service, or what they intended to do with it, because ENS, after realizing it lost access to this critical gateway successfully obtained a preliminary injunction from a federal district court judge in Phoenix, Arizona to stop the transfer and return the domain.
This itself opened up a period of litigation that had been “proceeding slowly through the courts,” ENS Labs CEO Nick Johnson wrote in a recent DAO proposal regarding the settlement. Slow and almost certainly unnecessary litigation — given that Manifold never really had a moral claim to the service.
ENS Labs has been operating eth.link as a public gateway for the Ethereum community since 2017, providing a way for traditional web services to access on-chain ENS and IPFS data, which is otherwise incompatible with the DNS (or domain naming service) architecture behind traditional websites.
ENS lost access to eth.link because the domain name was registered by Virgil Griffith, the Ethereum Foundation developer and former ENS…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Cryptocurrencies Feed…
