DeFi Advocacy Group Challenges Patent Troll’s Lawsuit

A group advocating for decentralized finance (DeFi) has petitioned the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to review a patent possessed by a company it has labeled a “patent troll a company that seeks to profit from patent lawsuits.

Chief Amanda Tuminelli stated this on Twitter on September 11. Tuminelli asserted that True Return attempted to sell its patent as an NFT.

In October, after failing to find a buyer, it filed a lawsuit against the DeFi protocols MakerDAO and Compound Finance.

“[True Return’s] goal was to name defendants who could not answer the complaint so [it] could get a default judgment,” Tuminelli said.

She claimed True Return would attempt to enforce the court’s ruling against token holders and replicate the process with other protocols “that either can’t challenge them in court or don’t have the resources to do so.

DEF asserted that the technology in True Return’s patent was not novel at the time it was granted, citing extant technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the decentralized storage platforms Sia, Storj, and Swarm.

DEF stated that it filed the petition with the USPTO to defend the ability to use and develop open-source software, to prevent True Return from suing cryptocurrency projects, and to aid MakerDAO and Compound’s legal defense.

True Return has three months to optionally respond to the petition. After six months, the USPTO must decide if it will proceed with reviewing the patent, at which point it has 12 months to determine whether the patent should be cancelled.