Did SBF Buy Uniswap and Redirected to SushiSwap?
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams says Sam Bankman-Fried once paid seven figures for the Uniswap.com domain and used it to redirect visitors toward SushiSwap, a rival decentralized exchange built as a direct fork of Uniswap’s own protocol. Adams shared the claim in a post on X on September 20, framing it as a “fun fact” about a legal dispute the company won years ago. What’s confirmed by the public record and what’s still just Adams’ own account, unsupported by documentation, are two different things worth separating clearly.
What Adams Actually Said
According to Adams, the domain’s original owners wanted a seven-figure sum for Uniswap.com, and Uniswap’s own team declined to pay it. Bankman-Fried, in Adams’ telling, later paid that price himself and pointed the domain toward a fork of the Uniswap protocol, an apparent jab at the company that had turned the deal down. “This malicious use of the domain was enough for our legal team to get it for free,” Adams wrote, referring to the legal process that eventually transferred control of the domain to Uniswap Labs without any payment to whoever held it at the time.
Adams’ post didn’t include supporting transaction records, purchase documentation, or the identity of the seller. It’s presented as a personal anecdote about the company’s history, not an evidenced claim, and that distinction matters for what follows.
What the Public Record Actually Confirms
A separate, official paper trail does exist here, and it corroborates a real portion of the story. Uniswap Labs filed a formal complaint over the Uniswap.com domain with the World Intellectual Property Organization in May 2021. A three-member WIPO panel examined archived versions of the site along with screenshots showing Uniswap.com redirecting visitors to SushiSwap’s interface throughout that period, contemporaneous reporting from The Block documented the same redirect at the time. The panel concluded that Uniswap Labs held legitimate registered trademark rights to the Uniswap name, and that redirecting traffic to a competing platform did not qualify as a good-faith use of the domain, creating a real risk that users would mistakenly believe Uniswap Labs had authorized or was affiliated with the destination site. On September 3, 2021, WIPO ordered the domain transferred to Uniswap Labs.
The registration history adds an interesting wrinkle: Uniswap.com itself was first registered back in July 2000, years before Hayden Adams created the Uniswap protocol at all. The respondent named in the WIPO proceeding had acquired the domain on April 7, 2021, identified in official filings only as “Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC / Future XXX” of Hong Kong, a privacy-shielded registration that doesn’t name an individual owner.
That’s the key gap in the story. The official WIPO decision does not identify Bankman-Fried as the purchaser, does not name him as “Future XXX,” and makes no mention anywhere of a seven-figure transaction. Everything about who actually bought the domain and how much they paid comes exclusively from Adams’ own account, not from the legal record itself.
Why the Claim Is Plausible, Even Without Direct Proof
There’s a real, documented connection between Bankman-Fried and SushiSwap that lends context to Adams’ account, even though it doesn’t independently confirm it. In September 2020, SushiSwap’s original, pseudonymous founder abruptly handed control of the project to Bankman-Fried during a governance crisis, and Bankman-Fried briefly ran the protocol afterward, overseeing its migration before governance eventually shifted to a multisignature framework and away from any single controlling party. That history means Bankman-Fried had a genuine, public relationship with SushiSwap specifically, the exact platform the disputed domain was redirecting traffic toward during 2021.
That connection makes Adams’ account plausible on its face. It doesn’t make it proven. A documented relationship with SushiSwap in 2020 is meaningfully different from confirming a specific domain purchase and a specific dollar figure a year later, and no outlet covering Adams’ claim has surfaced independent verification connecting the two beyond that circumstantial overlap.
Where Things Stand Now
Uniswap.com today redirects automatically to Uniswap’s official application, the resolution of the 2021 WIPO decision that’s been in place for years. Adams didn’t say in his post whether Bankman-Fried, or whoever the actual purchaser was, ever received any compensation for losing control of the domain; WIPO’s transfer process doesn’t typically involve payment to the losing party in a bad-faith domain dispute.
Bankman-Fried’s own circumstances have changed considerably since 2021. He was convicted of fraud in November 2023 following the collapse of FTX, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison along with an $11 billion forfeiture order. A petition to the U.S. Supreme Court remains his last realistic avenue for appeal. There’s been no public comment from Bankman-Fried on Adams’ claim as of this writing.
The Takeaway
This is a genuinely interesting piece of crypto trivia resurfacing years after the underlying dispute was resolved, and the parts that are independently verifiable, the WIPO complaint, the panel’s ruling, the redirect to SushiSwap, the transfer order, are all solid, documented facts. The specific detail that makes the story land, that Bankman-Fried personally paid seven figures for the domain, currently rests on one person’s account with no independent corroboration in the official record. Worth remembering as an interesting anecdote about Uniswap’s early history; worth treating as an unconfirmed claim, not an established fact, until better documentation surfaces.