Uniswap creator Hayden Adams has claimed that Sam Bankman-Fried paid a seven-figure sum for the Uniswap.com domain and pointed it at a rival exchange — and that Uniswap Labs later recovered the address at no cost through arbitration. The 2021 decision awarding the domain to Uniswap never identifies Bankman-Fried.

Adams recounts the domain battle on X

In a September 20 post on X, Adams traced the fight over the domain's ownership. He wrote that the "og owners" of Uniswap.com "wanted 7 figures," a price his company refused to pay. According to Adams, Bankman-Fried then met that figure and directed the domain to a Uniswap fork — a move Adams described as being "to flex / mess with us."

That misuse, Adams added, gave Uniswap's lawyers an opening to reclaim the address for free. The post drew more than 2,200 likes and more than 120 replies. Adams provided no documentation and did not name the seller, leaving the purchase claim — so far — resting on his account alone. Premium one-word .com domains have sold for seven figures before, but private sales of that kind rarely leave a public paper trail.

The fork in question was SushiSwap, a near-clone of Uniswap's code that launched in 2020 and competed directly with the protocol.

Uniswap Labs filed a complaint over the domain with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on May 18, 2021, stating that Uniswap.com was sending users to SushiSwap's interface. WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center handles such disputes under ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), the standard mechanism for challenging domain registrations that abuse trademarks.

Bankman-Fried is known to have ties to SushiSwap. He took control of the project from its anonymous creator during a governance crisis in September 2020, carried out a migration, and then transferred control to a multi-signature setup. That history lends plausibility to Adams' account, but it does not confirm that Bankman-Fried bought the domain.

WIPO ruling names a Hong Kong respondent

The arbitration panel ruled in Uniswap's favor, according to the WIPO decision. It found that Uniswap held registered trademark rights to UNISWAP and that redirecting visitors to a competitor was not a legitimate use of the domain. The panel also determined that the redirect could lead people to believe Uniswap supported the destination site.

The panel ordered the domain transferred to Uniswap Labs' legal entity, Universal Navigation Inc., on September 3, 2021, with Uniswap paying the losing side nothing.

The decision names the respondent as "Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, LLC" and "Future XXX," a Hong Kong party represented by Australian counsel. The ruling contains no record of a seven-figure payment, and Bankman-Fried's name appears nowhere in it.

According to the decision, the respondent acquired the domain on April 7, 2021. By the time of the ruling, the address led to a page selling sea urchin — the sushi ingredient called "uni" in Japanese — which Uniswap characterized as a transparent attempt to evade liability.

Uniswap.com now redirects visitors to the protocol's live app at app.uniswap.org. The protocol recently captured roughly 60% of decentralized trading volume in tokenized real-world assets.

Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year prison sentence over the collapse of FTX, the exchange he founded that filed for bankruptcy in November 2022; a jury convicted him on fraud charges in November 2023. He remains active online and continues to lobby for a pardon that prediction markets give long odds.