SBF Paid Seven Figures for Uniswap.com Just to Point It at SushiSwap — and It Ended Up Costing Him the Domain

SBF Paid Seven Figures for Uniswap.com Just to Point It at SushiSwap — and It Ended Up Costing Him the Domain

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has revived one of DeFi’s stranger historical footnotes, claiming that Sam Bankman-Fried personally paid seven figures for the Uniswap.com domain name in 2021 — purely, it seems, to needle the competition.

In a Sept. 21 post on X, Adams said the original owners of Uniswap.com wanted a seven-figure payment for the domain, a price the Uniswap team refused to pay. According to Adams, Bankman-Fried then bought it himself for that seven-figure sum and pointed it at a fork of the Uniswap protocol.

“I guess to flex / mess with us,” Adams wrote, describing what he believes was the motive — a personal speculation rather than a documented finding. The punchline of the story: that “malicious use” of the domain gave Uniswap’s legal team exactly the grounds they needed to seize Uniswap.com for free.

From prank purchase to WIPO ruling

The dispute dates back to the decentralized finance boom of 2021. Uniswap.com began redirecting visitors to SushiSwap — the decentralized exchange created as a fork of Uniswap — and contemporaneous reporting from The Block documented the redirect in May 2021, when the identity of the domain’s controller was unknown. SushiSwap contributor 0xMaki said at the time that the SushiSwap team had not bought the domain.

Uniswap Labs filed a complaint in May 2021, and a three-member panel at the World Intellectual Property Organization ordered the domain transferred to the company on Sept. 3, 2021.

The WIPO record, which remains publicly available, fills in the details. Registration records cited in the proceeding show Uniswap.com was first registered on July 30, 2000 — long before Hayden Adams created the Uniswap protocol. The respondent acquired the domain on April 7, 2021, according to a declaration from its legal representative.

The panel reviewed a screenshot dated May 18, 2021 and archived versions of the site through the Wayback Machine, confirming that pages from that month resolved to a SushiSwap webpage. The respondent argued that SushiSwap was an open-source derivative of Uniswap and disputed whether the redirect had initially been set up as claimed, but the panel rejected those arguments after reviewing the evidence.

WIPO found that using the Uniswap name did not become permissible simply because the underlying software was open source. Uniswap Labs held registered rights to the UNISWAP trademark, the domain was identical to that mark, and redirecting users to a direct competitor did not qualify as a bona fide use. The panel concluded the domain had been registered and used in bad faith, and ordered it transferred to Universal Navigation Inc., the legal entity operating as Uniswap Labs — at no purchase cost.

What the record does not say

Notably, the official WIPO decision never names Bankman-Fried. The respondent was identified as Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC / Future XXX of Hong Kong, represented by Australian law firm Cornwalls. The published ruling does not identify Bankman-Fried as the purchaser and discloses no seven-figure transaction.

Adams’ new claim is therefore the first public allegation tying the convicted FTX founder to the purchase — and it comes with a plausible backstory. Bankman-Fried had a documented role at SushiSwap months before the domain dispute: in September 2020, SushiSwap creator Chef Nomi handed control of the project to Bankman-Fried during a governance crisis after withdrawing tokens from the developer fund. Bankman-Fried helped oversee SushiSwap’s migration before control moved to a multisignature structure.

The SBF chapter, closed and not closed

The domain anecdote adds a small coda to Bankman-Fried’s tangled history with the DeFi world. In June 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit formally affirmed his fraud conviction, his 25-year prison sentence and an approximately 11 billion USD forfeiture order stemming from FTX’s collapse. That opinion concerned the FTX criminal case and made no findings about the 2021 Uniswap.com transaction.

As for the domain itself, a live check on Sept. 21 confirmed that Uniswap.com now redirects directly to the official Uniswap application at app.uniswap.org — ending a saga that began with a seven-figure flex, ran through a trademark war, and finished with the “free” transfer Adams described.

Uniswap Labs’ current trademark guidelines state that third parties should not use UNISWAP, UNI or UNISWAP LABS trademarks in domain names or in ways that could falsely suggest affiliation, and the company says it actively enforces those rights to protect users. Given how the last domain dispute ended, future buyers might want to read the guidelines before opening their wallets.