Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has claimed that Sam Bankman-Fried paid seven figures for the Uniswap.com domain before Uniswap Labs later gained control of it through a 2021 legal proceeding.
Adams said on Sept. 21 that the original owners wanted a seven-figure payment for the domain, but Uniswap rejected the price. According to Adams, Bankman-Fried later paid the amount and redirected Uniswap.com to a fork of the Uniswap protocol.
Adams did not reveal the exact purchase price, provide transaction documents or identify the seller. He also suggested that Bankman-Fried may have bought the domain to “flex” or cause problems for Uniswap, but that was Adams’ speculation and was not established by the later legal case.
The official World Intellectual Property Organization record confirms that Uniswap Labs filed a complaint over Uniswap.com in May 2021. A three-member WIPO panel ordered the domain to be transferred to Uniswap Labs on Sept. 3, 2021.
The dispute centered on the domain redirecting visitors to SushiSwap, a decentralized exchange that had been created as a fork of Uniswap.
WIPO reviewed a screenshot from May 18, 2021, along with archived versions of the website. The evidence showed that Uniswap.com was directing visitors to a SushiSwap page.
The panel said SushiSwap operated in the same financial market as Uniswap Labs. It also rejected arguments that the use of the domain was legitimate simply because SushiSwap was based on open-source Uniswap software.
Uniswap Labs had registered rights to the UNISWAP trademark, and WIPO found that Uniswap.com was identical to that trademark.
The panel also found that the redirect could confuse visitors into believing that Uniswap Labs was connected to, sponsored or endorsed SushiSwap.
WIPO concluded that the domain had been registered and used in bad faith.
The domain itself was originally registered on July 30, 2000, years before the Uniswap protocol was created. According to evidence submitted during the case, the respondent acquired the domain on April 7, 2021.
The official WIPO decision identified the respondent as Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC / Future XXX of Hong Kong. It did not identify Sam Bankman-Fried as the buyer, say that he was Future XXX or disclose any seven-figure payment.
WIPO found evidence that the respondent knew about Uniswap Labs before acquiring the domain and viewed the company as a competitor.
The panel ultimately ordered Uniswap.com to be transferred to Universal Navigation Inc., the company operating as Uniswap Labs.
Importantly, the proceeding did not require Uniswap Labs to buy the domain. The transfer happened through the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy after WIPO found bad-faith registration and use.
Adams later described the outcome by saying that the domain’s “malicious use” gave Uniswap’s legal team grounds to obtain it without buying it. The WIPO record supports the transfer process, although it does not use Adams’ wording or state how much Uniswap Labs spent on legal costs.
Bankman-Fried did have an earlier connection to SushiSwap, which provides some context for Adams’ claim.
In 2020, SushiSwap creator Chef Nomi handed control of the project to Bankman-Fried during a governance crisis. Bankman-Fried helped oversee the project’s migration before control later moved toward a multisignature structure.
SushiSwap had originally launched as a fork of Uniswap during the 2020 DeFi boom.
However, that history does not prove that Bankman-Fried owned or purchased Uniswap.com. Reporting from May 2021 said the person controlling the domain was unknown, while SushiSwap contributor 0xMaki denied that the SushiSwap team had purchased it.
The WIPO case also did not name Bankman-Fried. Its respondent was Future XXX, represented by Australian law firm Cornwalls.
Today, Uniswap.com redirects visitors to the official Uniswap application at app.uniswap.org, showing that the domain remains under Uniswap’s control.
Uniswap Labs’ current trademark rules also say third parties should not use UNISWAP, UNI or UNISWAP LABS in domain names in ways that could create false impressions of affiliation.
The domain dispute is separate from Bankman-Fried’s criminal case involving the collapse of FTX. In 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed his fraud conviction, 25-year prison sentence and roughly $11 billion forfeiture order.
That court ruling dealt with the FTX criminal case and did not make any finding about the 2021 Uniswap.com domain transaction.
