Dominic Williams, founder of the DFINITY Foundation, the organization behind Internet Computer (ICP), has renewed his criticism of Near Protocol, now alleging that NEAR's technology is a copy of ICP's. In recent posts, Williams claimed that Near Intents' Confidential Key Derivation (CKD) is derived from ICP's proprietary technology called vetKeys. He suggested the leak likely came from a former ICP employee who was dismissed for similar misconduct.
Legal threats and odds
Williams warned of possible legal implications and estimated his chances of winning a lawsuit at 70% to 85%. This follows earlier criticism in which he labeled NEAR "snake oil" and accused it of misleading marketing regarding its privacy rail, Confidential Intents, and NEAR AI.
Community and developer sentiment
NEAR supporters argue that Williams' public outburst is an aggressive marketing strategy to divert attention from ICP's price. They note that ICP is trading at $2.70, more than 99% below its 2021 launch price. They also highlight NEAR's growth in daily active addresses and institutional uptake as evidence of superior execution rather than speculation.
Conversely, ICP maximalists point to ICP's higher technical throughput of 2,000 blocks per second and hundreds of billions of total processed transactions. They criticize NEAR for relying on centralized cloud infrastructure such as AWS for the client-facing end of its applications, which they say introduces a significant single point of failure.
Current standing
NEAR currently leads in market cap, all-time price action, liquidity, and developer adoption. Meanwhile, ICP claims to prevail in long-term utility for decentralized privacy and AI infrastructure.
