An advocacy group for decentralised finance (DeFi) has asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to examine a patent held by a business it claims is a “patent troll” (a company that seeks to make money from patent disputes).
The DeFi Education Fund (DEF) claimed in a blog post on September 11, 2023 that it submitted a 90-plus page petition to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board on September 7 to invalidate a patent held by True Return Systems.
The DeFi Education Fund says that the patent owned by True Return Systems is being used to try to profit from lawsuits against decentralised protocols. The patent, which was granted in 2018, claims a method for “linking off-chain data to a Blockchain,” according to a statement made by Amanda Tuminelli, the legal director at DEF, on X (formerly Twitter) September 11, 2023.
According to Tuminelli, True Return attempted to market its invention as a non-fungible token (NFT). It launched a lawsuit in October 2022 against the DeFi protocols MakerDAO and Compound Finance after finding no buyers.
Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget has said that the metaverse sector is thriving in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan though the industry may appear to be dead to users in the United States.
“If you don’t focus on Asia, you will think the metaverse is dead from the North American and the Western side. But it’s so hot in Asia. Hong Kong and Korea are the top two markets, followed by Japan,”Borget told Cointelegraph at the Asian Blockchain Gaming Alliance’s Web 3.0 Summit in Singapore on September 12, 2023.
He further said that compared to previous year, around 50 per cent of Sandbox’s revenue had come from several Asian nations.
Developers from Seashell, RNG Labs, and Loreum Labs, along with mentors and partners from Ampleforth, Uniswap, and other projects have created the Seamless Protocol, an Aave v3 fork that permits smart contracts with specified borrowing strategies to carry out undercollateralised borrowing on-chain.
Seamless Protocol is deployed on layer-2 network Base, a non-custodial liquidity markets that is being introduced by a group of DeFi developers, with the goal of enabling trustless smart contracts to automatically link liquidity pools with borrowing methods.
“As an analogy, Borrowing Strategies are like single-purpose loans, such as home, auto, or school loans — the supplier knows exactly where the liquidity is being used, and the borrower is unable to use it for different purposes,” a contributor for Seamless told Cointelegraph, referring to undercollateralised borrowing options.
