The Freename Forum

The legal dispute over the eth.link domain, which has been smouldering since September 2022, has come to an amicable end: the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) can keep the domain, with the parties involved bearing the costs themselves.

Anyone accessing the eth.link domain in September 2022 was in the middle of a thriller. Instead of receiving information about the ENS or the cryptocurrency Ethereum and being able to register and access blockchain domains with the alternative ending .eth, only an empty website appeared. The domain eth.link registered via the US registrar GoDaddy expired on 26 July 2022. The only person who could have renewed it was its owner, Virgil Griffith. However, Griffith was in prison without an internet connection after being sentenced to 63 months in prison in April 2022 for passing on secret information to North Korea. As Griffith was unable to renew the domain in time, it was auctioned via Dynadot; the winning bid was placed by Manifold Finance, which offered a record price of US$ 851,919.30 (approx. EUR 845,000). In order to avert the domain loss, True Names Ltd (now trading as ENS Labs Ltd), the company behind ENS, and Griffith filed a lawsuit against GoDaddy, Dynadot and Manifold Finance in an Arizona court (Case No. 2:22-cv-01494-PXH-JJT). The plaintiffs accused GoDaddy of wrongfully allowing the domain to expire. In order not to jeopardise the more than two million .eth domains that were linked via eth.link at the time, the court had provisionally ordered that GoDaddy not be allowed to transfer the domain and that ENS be re-registered as the owner. Dynadot transferred the domain to the plaintiffs, but placed a transfer block on it to prevent it from being transferred to another registrar. The legal dispute continued in the main proceedings.

After Manifold Finance withdrew from the legal dispute due to the lack of jurisdiction of the court seised, the dispute has now also been settled. A notice from the parties to the court dated 23 August 2024 states: ‘All parties to this action, including Plaintiffs ENS Labs, LTD, and Virgil Griffith and Defendants GoDaddy Inc., GoDaddy.com, LLC, and Dynadot LLC, hereby stipulate to a dismissal of the above-captioned action with prejudice in its entirety, including all claims, causes of action, and parties, with each of the parties to bear its own attorney fees and costs.’ The action is therefore not pursued further by mutual agreement and each party bears its own attorney fees and costs. The exact content of the settlement is not yet publicly known. However, ENS has announced that Manifold Finance will receive US$ 300,000 and sign ‘confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses’; in return, the eth.link domain will remain with ENS. The members of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) of ENS agreed to this settlement with a majority of 87.96 percent. In the event of the legal dispute continuing, ENS had pointed to high costs; by March 2024, the expenses are said to have already totalled around US$ 750,000.

All owners of .eth domains can breathe a sigh of relief. The alternative Web3 addresses are linked to the domain eth.link, so the domain example.eth resolves to example.eth.link. With the loss of eth.link, the .eth domains would have been practically unusable within the Domain Name System. ENS emphasises that financial risks have been minimised and that it wants to concentrate on its core tasks again without being distracted by further legal disputes.

Further information on the legal dispute can be found at:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64 ... orporated/