Maple Finance CEOs had to venture into social media last week to explain a new, competing product they claim was derived from their own.
The Perimeter Protocol, a collection of smart contracts published by Circle - the company behind theUSDC stablecoin - was 'forked' from Maple, the company's head of growth and capital markets.
Circle denied the charge in a statement to DL News.
It wasn't the only attribution complaint directed at Circle in the past week.
Last Sunday, James Prestwich, co-founder and CTO of Crypto Bridge Nomad, went to GitHub to flag Circle's use of Nomad code in Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol. In addition, Circle quickly updated that protocol's code repository to provide proper attribution.
Software products are often protected by closely guarded secrets. In crypto, where code is usually open-source, it can be used for any reason by anyone, for any reason. Copies of popular protocols - forks - in crypto parlance are common.
Crypto protocols without open-source licenses are typically protected by relatively lax licences, like a BusinessSource License, which safeguards the code in question from being used and profited from by others for a certain period of time.
Moreover, in an industry where the most widely used applications are tied to finance, making code public is a matter of security, said Benjamin Cole, a professor at Fordham University's Gabelli School of Business.
The row is the latest to highlight disputes over authorship that arise when companies' software is published for the world to see.
Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm and Matter Labs, the blockchain company behind zkSync, have faced allegations of copying others' code. Both companies deny the accusations.
Rachel Mayer, Circle's vice president of product, said in a blog post explaining Perimeter's release.
Maple's Thompson referred questions about the Circle accusations to Powell, who declined to comment on the parts of Perimeter's code they believe were forked from Maple. But Powell said Maple's code was protected by a BusinessSource License.
While maple's code is protected, it is available for anyone with an internet connection to peruse on GitBook. Perimeter Protocol's code has been published on GitHub, a popular code repository.
Maple doesn't have open-source, but it could submit a 'takedown request' for Perimeter's code to Github, which is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation, according to Fordham's Cole.
Cole, 79, said he was determined to make it a reality, not just one of the biggest players in the world.
Maple could also pursue Circle in court, relying again on a line-by-line, code-to-code comparison, Cole said.
The copyright is over, Mr. Cole said in a statement.
s most obvious defence in court if pursued legally by Maple Finance -i.e., there are only so many ways to write smart contracts that perform certain functions, he said.