The company Bancor has filed a lawsuit for patent infringement against Uniswap Labs and Uniswap Foundation ($UNI ), accusing them of illegally using the underlying technology of decentralized exchange. The lawsuit was filed by the non-profit organization Bprotocol Foundation, which supports the development of the Bancor protocol, and LocalCoin Ltd., the original developer of Bancor. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that the Uniswap protocol is built on the patented Bancor Constant Product Automated Market Maker (CPAMM) infrastructure. Bancor, credited with inventing the CPAMM model in 2016, developed a mechanism for conducting permissionless transactions on the network using smart contracts. In 2017, the protocol published a technical document and filed patent applications in the U.S. According to a press release from May 20, Bancor received two patents and launched the first CPAMM-based DEX the same year. The lawsuit claims that the original Uniswap protocol, launched in November 2018, uses the same CPAMM design without permission. Bancor claims that Uniswap 'has made huge profits' using its intellectual property without consent.
