The firm behind the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has launched a lawsuit against domain registrar GoDaddy for selling a previously-owned website name.
True Names Ltd. claims that GoDaddy incorrectly declared the eth.link domain expired and sold it to a third party. Plaintiffs True Names and Virgil Griffith regarded this as a breach of contract. Griffith is currently serving a jail sentence after being convicted earlier this year.
The case was filed with the U.S. District Court for Arizona’s District. Apart from GoDaddy, two other firms were cited in the complaint: Dynadot and Manifold Finance. Crowell & Moring LLP is the law firm that represents the plaintiffs.
ENS provides decentralised names used to replace standard alphanumeric Ethereum wallet addresses. The widely used service inside Ethereum applications depended on the web domain eth.link to enable the usage of cryptographic addresses in web browsers. This was the domain registered by ENS with GoDaddy.
Allegations timeline
While True Name used the eth.link domain for its operations, the domain was registered in 2018 by Griffith, a former employee, according to the company’s lawsuit.
After delivering a keynote at a crypto conference in North Korea in 2019, Griffith was accused of aiding the government in violating sanctions. In the end, he was sentenced to 63 months in jail.
True Names stated that it first neglected to renew the domain name in July 2022. During the grace period, easyDNS re-registered the domain on its behalf, as published on the ENS community forum.
According to the complaint, GoDaddy continued to declare the name expired despite the re-registration on August 25. GoDaddy reportedly sold the eth.link domain to Dynadot on September 3 without alerting the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs attempted to contact GoDaddy but to no avail.
“We are disappointed to see the acts of GoDaddy and feel misled due to being told that the domain would be returned to the registry, only to find out it was purportedly sold to another domain provider before we had the chance to claim it,” said Nick Johnson.
In an auction on September 3, Dynadot reportedly resold the domain to Manifold Finance, a cryptocurrency business, for $852,000. On September 3, Manifold announced on Twitter that it had acquired the domain.
https://t.co/tpR0rT37zf was just sniped by us.
Services to be restored once ownership transfer complete. #Ethereum #ENS
— manifoldfinance.eth (@foldfinance) September 3, 2022
Since losing access to the eth.link domain, True Names has adopted the eth.limo domain as the new Web gateway for ENS names.
GoDaddy and Dynadot promptly failed to react to CoinCulture’s request for comment. When contacted, neither True Names nor Manifold Finance was immediately available for comment.