- ENS Labs has announced new details in its case against GoDaddy, Dynadot and Manifold Finance.
- The latter offered an amicable settlement to the dispute but demanded $300,000 for it.
- ENS Labs has reached out to the Ethereum Name Services community with an offer to choose a future course of action.
Manifold Finance has offered ENS Labs to peacefully settle the dispute over the eth.link domain. The firm will transfer all rights to it in exchange for a $300,000 compensation and a confidentiality agreement.
ENS Labs is the development studio behind the Ethereum Name Service project. The eth.link domain, in turn, was used as a blockchain community gateway to access some resources.
The company published the Manifold Finance proposal and put it up for a community vote. Management token holders were asked to express their opinions on a number of issues, namely:
- Approval of the agreement and its amount;
- the advisability of proceeding further;
- reimbursement of ENS Labs’ expenses during the litigation.
The organization noted that it has already spent about $750,000 of its own money. Continuing the process threatens additional costs, which it proposes to cover from the treasury, the statement said.
In the event that none of the options garner 50% of the votes, ENS Labs will withdraw from the proceedings and post a warning on the eth.link domain page about the potential change of ownership.
The organization obtained an injunction for Manifold Finance and hosting service GoDaddy to use the web resource. However, this merely allowed the studio to keep the domain name for the duration of the process, the post says.
What’s the issue here
The eth.link domain originally belonged to programmer Virgil Griffith. In 2022, he received a five-year prison sentence on charges of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
Griffith donated the domain to ENS Labs. As of 2018, it was registered on GoDaddy hosting. In the summer of 2022, the platform sold the domain without ENS Labs’ knowledge, allegedly due to an expired agreement and lack of payment.
It was bought by Dynadot, who resold the domain to Manifold Finance for $852,000. ENS Labs sued GoDaddy in September 2022.
