After a week of the ICP patent drama, here is what I see. DFINITY started two lines the same week in 2021: a sealed patent application, and a public CC BY paper with the same method. For three years the public line was the only one anyone could see. NEAR built on it and cited it. Then DFINITY switched to the sealed line and asked for money. The product they built on the same patent holds about 240 BTC today. The dates, all public and linkable. Sep 30, 2021: DFINITY files a patent application on re-randomized presignatures. Applications are sealed until published, nobody outside the company can read them. Oct 5, 2021: five days later, the same two people, Jens Groth and Victor Shoup, DFINITY's cryptographers and the named inventors on the patent, put the same method on eprint under CC BY. Free for anyone to use, attribution only. Nov 13, 2023: a NEAR engineer opens a public ticket. He describes a known attack on ECDSA with derived keys and presignatures, and proposes the defense from Groth and Shoup's paper, citing it by name: "one technique proposed in [GroSho22] is to re-randomize presignatures". Merged in December. This is how cryptography is supposed to work: you do not invent your own, you take a published, peer-reviewed construction and say where it came from. The code running today still carries the comment "inspired by [GS21]" with a link to the paper, and the Trail of Bits audit describes it the same way. Nov 28, 2024: the application becomes public for the first time. Three years after filing, a year after NEAR cited the paper. Jul 28, 2026: patent granted. Sep 25, 2026: NEAR makes online presign the default, a path where the presignature is computed after the request and there is nothing stored to re-randomize. The PR description is about protocol safety, no patents mentioned. Oct 2026: DFINITY's founder calls it theft and asks for license fees back to the first day of use. Bottom line: two paths opened the same week. NEAR took the public one for three years and said so at every step. DFINITY waited until the sealed one was granted, then came for the readers of the public one.