Bancor Sues Uniswap, Accusing Its DEX Smart Contract Technology of Patent Infringement

BlockBeats News, May 20th, According to The Block, developers behind Bancor have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation, alleging that they illegally used its underlying decentralized exchange technology. The lawsuit was brought by the non-profit organization Bprotocol Foundation, which supports the Bancor protocol, and LocalCoin Ltd., Bancor's original developer. The lawsuit has been filed in the Southern District of New York, accusing the Uniswap protocol of being built on Bancor's patented Constant Product Automated Market Maker (CPAMM) infrastructure.

Bancor invented the CPAMM model in 2016 and developed a mechanism to support permissionless on-chain transactions through smart contracts. The protocol released a whitepaper in 2017 and submitted a U.S. patent application. Bancor was granted two patents that year and launched the first DEX based on CPAMM. The lawsuit alleges that the original protocol launched by Uniswap in November 2018 unauthorizedly used the same CPAMM design. Bancor accuses Uniswap of deploying its intellectual property without consent, thereby "profiting unfairly."