Cardano Foundation Sued by Former Research Partner 

The Cardano Foundation, a blockchain firm and the developers of the ADA digital asset, have found themselves in a bit of a legal tussle. As the company announced in a press release earlier this week, Z/Yen Group Limited (UK), one of its partners, has launched a legal suit against it. 

A Broken-Down Relationship or a Legitimate IP Suit? 

The Z/Yen Group is a FinTech solutions provider that worked with the Cardano Foundation on research and development for a while. Back in 2018, the two entities collaborated to release “The Quantum Countdown: Quantum Computing and the Future of Distributed Ledger Encryption,” an educational material that explained how the development of quantum computing could affect blockchain technology and its development going forward.

As the press release explained, the legal trouble stemmed from an alleged agreement between the think tank and the Cardano Foundation that dates back to July 2017. The Foundation claimed that it terminated the agreement for several reasons and rejected the London firm’s claims. After the contract was voided, however, there were renewed reports of a potential intellectual property rights dispute between them.

Replying to the threat, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson explained, “It’s not an intellectual property dispute, It’s merely a commercial dispute. IOHK has nothing to do with this issue. There is nothing in what Z/Yen has done that has ended up in the protocol design of the code or anything implemented in Cardano.”

Hoskinson added that the entire dispute stemmed from the previous administration, under Michael Parsons, the former Chairman of the Foundation Council of the Cardano Foundation. As he explained, Parsons and Michael Mainelli, the Principal at the Z/Yen Group, were good friends, and they were in the process of writing some reports on his company. 

However, the Cardano Foundation chose to re-evaluate all of its commercial relationships when Parsons was removed in 2018 after several allegations of misconduct. The nature of Parsons’ removal forced the Foundation to make drastic changes, and it would seem that the deal with the think tank also broke down.

Moving on with a Blockchain Update 

Despite the setback, the Cardano Foundation seems to be gearing up for a big year. On March 13, Hoskinson appeared in a YouTube Ask Me Anything (AME) live stream, where he confirmed that the coin would be launching several commercial infrastructures in the coming months. 

In the live stream, he confirmed that several parties involved in the coin’s development have started to set some funds aside for commercial infrastructure, which will help make the asset more competitive against other cryptocurrencies. 

He added that the infrastructure would help to enable decentralized applications such as DeFi protocols to work properly on the Cardano blockchain. He also mentioned that the blockchain’s Jormungandr node software would see a major upgrade that will allow users to retire stake pools more easily. 

Good progress is being made on the new network update, which they already named “Shelley. Hoskinson also added that they had addressed a vast majority of bugs on the Shelley testnet over the past month, as the software is becoming more stable.