Virgil Griffith’s incarceration for helping North Korea evade sanctions led to an expired domain dispute.
A man whose incarceration sparked a domain name dispute has been released from prison.
Virgil Griffith pleaded guilty to a charge of violating international sanctions after teaching North Korea how to evade sanctions by using cryptocurrency. North Korea has become a large criminal organization in the crypto space.
He was released from prison this month after serving 36 months of his 56-month sentence.
Griffith’s imprisonment led to an interesting domain name dispute.
Before his incarceration, the Ethereum enthusiast registered eth.link and created a site that helped .eth domains (part of Ethereum Name Service or ENS) resolve to websites in standard browsers. If the ENS name was example.eth, a user could type example.eth.link into any browser to resolve it to a website.
The domain expired while Griffith was in prison and was auctioned off on Dynadot with a final bid of $852,000.
That set off a frantic effort by Ethereum Name Service (True Names, Ltd) to get control of the domain. It filed a lawsuit against GoDaddy (where the domain was registered), Dynadot (which had a partnership to auction the domain), and the winning bidder.
Eventually, it decided to drop the case.
As of now, eth.link forwards to eth.limo, a similar service.
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