Hayden Adams says SBF bought Uniswap.com for seven figures before WIPO returned it

The creator of Uniswap, Hayden Adams, said Sam Bankman-Fried had spent a seven-figure sum on the domain Uniswap.com and pointed it to a rival exchange. Then Uniswap Labs got the address back for free through arbitration.

The 2021 ruling awarding the domain to Uniswap never identifies Bankman-Fried.

Adams claims Bankman-Fried met the original owners’ asking price

In a September 20 post on X, Adams traced the battle over who owned the domain. He wrote that the “og owners” of Uniswap.com “wanted 7 figures,” a price his company refused to pay.

Adams said Bankman-Fried then met that figure, pointing the domain to a Uniswap fork. Adams described it as a move “to flex / mess with us.”

The misuse gave Uniswap’s lawyers a chance to reclaim the address for free, he added.

More than 2,200 people liked the post, and it drew more than 120 replies. Adams didn’t provide any paperwork or name the seller.

The fork was SushiSwap, a near-clone of Uniswap’s code that launched in 2020 and directly vied with it.

Uniswap Labs filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization over the domain on May 18, 2021. Uniswap.com was sending users to SushiSwap’s interface, the filing said.

Bankman-Fried is known to have a tie to SushiSwap. He took over the project from its anonymous creator, who transferred control during a governance crisis in September 2020.

He did a migration and then transferred control to a multi-signature setup. That history makes Adams’ account plausible but doesn’t confirm that he bought the domain.

WIPO record names a Hong Kong respondent

The arbitration panel ruled in favor of Uniswap. It found that the company had registered trademark rights to UNISWAP, and redirecting visitors to a competitor was not a legitimate use.

The panel also found that the redirect could lead people to believe that Uniswap supported the destination.

It ordered the domain transferred to Uniswap Labs’ legal entity, Universal Navigation Inc., on September 3, 2021, with Uniswap paying the losing side nothing.

The respondent is named in the decision as “Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC” and “Future XXX,” a Hong Kong party represented by Australian counsel. There is no record of a seven-figure sum, and Bankman-Fried’s name is not found anywhere.

The decision says that the respondent got the domain on April 7, 2021. By the ruling, the address led to a page hawking sea urchin, the sushi ingredient called “uni” in Japanese, which Uniswap called a transparent attempt to evade liability.

Uniswap.com now redirects visitors to Uniswap’s live app at app.uniswap.org. The protocol recently captured ~60% of decentralized volume in tokenized real-world assets.

Bankman-Fried is now serving a 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX. He remains active on the internet, still lobbying for a pardon that prediction markets give long odds to.

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