It has been an absolute bloodbath for cryptocurrency investors over the last month. With bitcoin trading at one time below $8,000 and the total market losing over $400B in market value, many are patiently waiting for the bull market to return.

While the crypto crash has clearly dominated the news cycle over the last few weeks, another interesting story has been developing in the privacy coin space. On January 25th, an anonymous developer for the Monero Project, currently the largest privacy coin with a market cap of $4 Billion, filed a DMCA claim on GitHub against the growing forked coin, Sumokoin (market cap of $20M).

The request, which you can read here, claimed Sumokoin improperly cited the Monero copyright in their repo, which ultimately goes against the GitHub terms of service.

Here is how the Sumokoin headers were labeled before the complaint:

Copyright (c) 2016-2017, SUMOKOIN, (forked from) The Monero Project

And here is how they should have been labeled and what they were eventually changed to:

Copyright (c) 2017, SUMOKOIN Copyright (c) 2014-2017, The Monero Project

According to several Reddit posts, the anonymous Monero developer opened the issue on their repo and, instead of advising an amendment, filed a DMCA claim, under oath.

While the injunction was completely legal and the developer had every right to file it, many in the Sumokoin community believe this to be an overreaction and drastic breach of the underlying open-source spirit of the cryptocurrency movement. Members of the Monero community claim that this issue was brought up on the Sumokoin Telegram prior to the official complaint, but we cannot confirm that any members of the Sumokoin team received this information.

Moving Forward

As of early February, the Sumokoin GitHub page has been officially reinstated. While this debacle will ultimately be a small bump in the road for Sumokoin, it has raised questions about how contentious Monero intends to be to projects they perceive as competitors.

According to a recent Sumokoin Community (an unofficial, but popular Sumokoin Twitter account) tweet on Jan. 28, the Monero core development community largely disagrees with the action that was taken against the Sumokoin project. This could perhaps be taken as a positive indicator that Monero is not ‘out to get’ anyone, but only time will tell.

$xmr core dev community disagrees with the way a solitary contributor acted regarding $sumo repo DMCA (ask us for evidence).It's up to them though to regulate their community and protect the open source spirit.There's will for coexistance and better communication from both sides — Sumokoin Community (@Sumokoin_tweet) January 28, 2018

There is no question that an error was made by the Sumokoin team in their copyright listing, and there is no question that the injunction taken against them was one of the more drastic responses we’ve seen between competing cryptocurrency projects.

We welcome any direct comment from team members of either Sumokoin or Monero, and we would be happy to publish any official statements to help further clarify the events detailed in this article.

Please email us at info@sludgefeed.com