On Tuesday, Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by plaintiffs Bprotocol Foundation and LocalCoin Ltd., alleging unauthorized use of patented technologies that facilitate blockchain transactions. According to the plaintiffs, these technologies allow cryptocurrency traders to conduct transactions directly without intermediaries like banks or brokers. The legal action has been initiated by the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, representing the plaintiffs who claim that their innovations are foundational to decentralized finance (DeFi) exchanges.
A spokesperson for Uniswap noted that the protocol’s code has been publicly available for years, asserting that the public nature of their codebase could potentially counter the claims of patent infringement. The lawsuit raises significant questions regarding intellectual property rights in the decentralized technology space, especially given DeFi’s reliance on open-source protocols.
For further reading, you can access the original article published by the New York Law Journal.