Dominic Williams, the founder of DFINITY Foundation (organization behind Internet Computer or ICP), has continued to attack Near Protocol, now claiming it is a copy of ICP’s technology.
Williams: Near Intents are based on ICP proprietary tech
Previously, CoinPedia covered how NEAR’s price was rallying despite the protocol being bashed by Williams as “snake oil”. He specifically said it has “misleading marketing” over its privacy rail dubbed Confidential Intents and NEAR AI.
In his latest posts, Williams now alleges Near Intents’ Confidential Key Derivation (CKD) is developed from ICP’s proprietary tech called vetKeys. He adds that the leak likely came from a former ICP employee who was let go for similar misconduct.
Williams has now warned of possible legal implications, and his chances of winning are at a favorable 70%-85%.
Community and developer sentiment
Supporters of Near claim Williams’ public outburst is merely an aggressive marketing strategy meant to shift attention from ICP’s price. Trading at $2.70, ICP is now more than 99% below its 2021 launch price.
Even more, they highlight Near’s massive growth in daily active address count and institutional uptake. These achievements, according to advocates, are proof of superior execution rather than speculation.
On the other hand, ICP maximalists point out its higher technical throughput of 2,000 blocks per second, and hundreds of billions of total processed transactions.
They go on to criticize Near for relying on centralized cloud infrastructure such as AWS to handle the client-facing end of its applications, saying this introduces a huge single point of failure.
Where things are at now
Ultimately, Near prevails when it comes to market cap, all-time price action, liquidity, and developer adoption. Meanwhile, ICP claims to prevail in terms of long-term utility in decentralized privacy and AI infrastructure.