We've all heard about Ripple's ongoing legal spat with R3.
Now University College London (UCL) has withdrawn from it's partnership with IOTA after it's researchers were supposedly threatened with legal action after carrying out research that exposed floors in IOTA's blockchain software.
Image credits: CCN
This comes after the digital currency initiative (DCI) - a research community out of MIT published a report in February exposing floors in IOTA's hash function, that immediately prompted IOTA's co-founder to announce it's lawyers are on the case.
Whether UCL / DCI have agendas against IOTA or for another project, or whether it's simply innocent research of open source software, is not clear. But it looks like this space is starting to get more partisan... as the stakes rise and competition between projects intensifies.
IOTA has a market cap of US$5 billion and was as high as US$14 billion in December 2017. In that context, it may be inevitable that legal disputes will become commonplace in an industry that not so long ago seemed so innocent.
In the end the lawyers always win!