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May 4, 2022 02:51 pm

'Tired' Carl Sagan Fan Sells Wormhole.com To Crypto Giant Jump for $50K After Lawsuit

An anonymous reader shares a report: The realm of physics offers the exciting possibility of "wormholes" that could let us collapse space and time. But here on Earth, most of us are subject to more mundane realities -- including that the rich and powerful usually get what they want. Dick Merryman, a 79-year-old computer engineer, got a reminder of that last month when Jump Operations -- the holding company for crypto giant Jump Trading -- put the legal screws to him to obtain wormhole.com, a domain he has owned for years and that corresponds to an email he created for he and his wife. For Merryman, the domain reflects his fondness for astrophysicist Carl Sagan, whose 1985 novel "Contact" deployed a "wormhole" to let characters skip across light years. Merryman purchased the wormhole.com domain in 1994, creating a simple placeholder website that displays a cosmic picture. For Jump, however, "wormhole" has a very different significance. It is the name of a crypto platform that creates "bridges" between popular blockchains such as Solana and Ethereum, and in which Jump has a very significant investment. While Jump is currently using the wormholenetwork.com to host Wormhole-related content, it has coveted the shorter name owned by Merryman, and began trying to acquire it last year. In June of 2021, someone at Jump used a third-party domain broker to approach Merryman and offer $2,500 for the name. The latter rebuffed the request, saying -- perhaps in jest -- that the price was a "firm US$50000." To Merryman's surprise, Jump promptly accepted the offer -- an acceptance that Merryman proceeded to ignore. After being badgered by the broker, he made his feelings clear a few weeks later. Jump then pulled out the big guns. The company's lawyers warned Merryman he was in breach of contract and that he had to honor the message saying he would sell for $50,000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/05/04/1451242/tired-carl-sagan-fan-sells-wormholecom-to-crypto-giant-jump-for-50k-after-lawsuit?utm_source=rss1.0main

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