Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has said Sam Bankman-Fried paid seven figures for Uniswap.com before Uniswap Labs secured the domain through a 2021 legal proceeding that found it had been used in bad faith.
Summary
- Hayden Adams says SBF paid seven figures for Uniswap.com after Uniswap rejected the seller’s price.
- WIPO ordered Uniswap.com transferred to Uniswap Labs in September 2021 after finding bad-faith domain use.
- The 2021 WIPO ruling confirmed Uniswap.com redirected visitors to SushiSwap, a competing decentralized exchange platform.
- WIPO records identify Future XXX as respondent but do not name Sam Bankman-Fried as purchaser.
- Uniswap.com currently redirects visitors to Uniswap’s official app, confirming the domain remains under project control.
In a Sept. 21 post on X, Adams said the original owners wanted a seven-figure payment for the domain, which his team declined. He claimed Bankman-Fried later paid that amount and redirected Uniswap.com toward a fork of the Uniswap protocol. Adams did not disclose the purchase price, transaction documents or identity of the seller in his post.
“I guess to flex / mess with us,” Adams wrote while discussing Bankman-Fried’s possible motive. The phrasing was speculation by Adams, not a documented finding from the later domain proceeding.
A review of the official WIPO case record confirms several other parts of the account. Uniswap Labs filed a complaint over Uniswap.com in May 2021, and a three-member World Intellectual Property Organization panel ordered the domain transferred to the company on Sept. 3, 2021.
Uniswap.com redirected users to SushiSwap in 2021
The dispute began after Uniswap.com appeared to send visitors to SushiSwap, the decentralized exchange created as a fork of Uniswap. Contemporary reporting from The Block documented the redirect in May 2021, when the identity of the domain owner was not publicly known. SushiSwap contributor 0xMaki said at the time that the SushiSwap team had not bought the domain.
WIPO later examined the redirect directly. Its panel reviewed a screenshot dated May 18, 2021 and checked archived versions of Uniswap.com through the Wayback Machine. The records showed pages from May resolving to a SushiSwap webpage. The panel described SushiSwap as operating in the same financial market as Uniswap Labs.
The respondent contested parts of Uniswap Labs’ case. According to the WIPO decision, it argued that SushiSwap was an open-source derivative of the Uniswap protocol and disputed whether the redirect had initially been established. The panel rejected those arguments after reviewing the additional evidence.
WIPO found that using the Uniswap name for a domain did not become permissible simply because the underlying software was open source. Uniswap Labs held registered rights to the UNISWAP trademark, and the panel found the domain identical to that mark.
The panel determined that redirecting users to SushiSwap did not qualify as a bona fide use of the domain and created a high risk of implied affiliation with Uniswap Labs.
WIPO found Uniswap.com had been used in bad faith
Registration records cited by WIPO show that Uniswap.com itself was first registered on July 30, 2000, years before Hayden Adams created the Uniswap protocol. The respondent in the 2021 proceeding acquired the domain on April 7, 2021, according to a declaration from its legal representative.
The official proceeding identified the respondent as Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC / Future XXX of Hong Kong. The published decision does not identify Bankman-Fried as Future XXX, name him as the domain purchaser or disclose a seven-figure transaction.
WIPO found credible evidence showing that the respondent knew about Uniswap Labs before acquiring the domain and regarded the company as a competitor. The panel said the respondent failed to address evidence contradicting its earlier claim that it lacked prior awareness of Uniswap Labs.
On the domain’s use, the panel found that the SushiSwap redirect intentionally created confusion over whether Uniswap Labs was connected to, sponsored or endorsed the destination. WIPO consequently determined that the domain had been registered and used in bad faith.
Its Sept. 3, 2021 decision ordered Uniswap.com transferred to Universal Navigation Inc., which operates as Uniswap Labs. The decision came under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy and did not require Uniswap Labs to purchase the domain from the respondent.
Adams described that result more simply in his Sept. 21 post, saying the “malicious use” gave Uniswap’s legal team enough grounds to obtain the domain “for free.” The WIPO record supports the court-like transfer mechanism, though it does not use Adams’ wording or state what legal expenses Uniswap Labs incurred.
SBF had an earlier connection to SushiSwap
Bankman-Fried had a documented role in SushiSwap months before the Uniswap.com dispute. As crypto.news reported in September 2020, SushiSwap creator Chef Nomi handed control of the project to Bankman-Fried during a governance crisis after withdrawing tokens from its developer fund.
Bankman-Fried helped oversee SushiSwap’s migration before control moved toward a multisignature structure. SushiSwap itself had launched as a fork of Uniswap during the 2020 decentralized-finance boom.
The historical relationship provides context for Adams’ new statement but does not independently establish Bankman-Fried’s ownership of Uniswap.com. Reporting in May 2021 said the person controlling the domain remained unknown, while 0xMaki denied that the SushiSwap team itself had purchased it.
The WIPO record similarly stops short of naming Bankman-Fried. Its respondent was Future XXX, represented in the proceeding by Australian law firm Cornwalls, and WIPO based its ruling on trademark rights, the SushiSwap redirect and evidence of bad-faith use.
Uniswap.com now redirects to Uniswap’s official app
More than five years after the dispute, Uniswap.com now redirects directly to the official Uniswap application at app.uniswap.org. A live check of the domain on Sept. 21 confirmed the redirect.
Uniswap Labs’ current trademark guidelines state that third parties should not use UNISWAP, UNI or UNISWAP LABS trademarks in domain names or create names that could falsely suggest affiliation. The company says it enforces its trademark rights to protect users.
Its current support directory still identifies Uniswap.org as the company’s official website and app.uniswap.org as its trading interface, while Uniswap.com functions as a redirect.
Bankman-Fried remains involved in separate criminal proceedings stemming from FTX’s collapse. In related crypto.news coverage, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit formally affirmed his fraud conviction, 25-year prison sentence and approximately $11 billion forfeiture order in 2026.
The official Second Circuit opinion was issued June 12, 2026. It concerned Bankman-Fried’s FTX criminal case and made no findings about the 2021 Uniswap.com domain transaction.
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