Explaining the NIFTSY licence. Why is it like this?

6 min readJun 18, 2021

Below is the basic license of the core part of the NIFTSY protocol (and we also have Oracle and Index: did you know that?). And the first question to answer is exactly “why did it need a special article? Perhaps that’s where we should start with the answer:

Because….

NIFTSY doesn’t just follow the principles of decentralisation and openness, but we have DAO for everything: all of the credits received in seed and private rounds are distributed according to general accounting/distribution principles, i.e. via multi-signatures and after agreement of all team members (however, an absolute majority is enough).

That is on the one hand.

On the other hand, we live in a complicated time, where centralized structures and dishonest players mimicking bona fide participants of p2p-projects are trying to take over and/or establish power through trivial mechanics: extortion, stealing, psychological pressure, including cheating. So we decided to take the simple way: to give the product “as is”, that is, under the MIT license to everyone who is honest with us. In case you don’t know what it is — it’s time to read the Wiki.

For the rest of you.

The license is …

The full name of the license is: “The license for business and general use of the NIFTSY protocol. 27.05.2021 — date of the first edition of v. 0.1”.

Preamble

This Agreement (hereinafter — the License or the Agreement) is intended for any business regardless of the form, name, geographical and/or other location, i.e. for all organisations and/or individual entrepreneurs (businessmen) which are connected to the NIFTSY Protocol (hereinafter — the Protocol) and/or use it and/or its components in any way, regardless of clarifications, additions or other changes of any order (level): any use of the Protocol means that you have fully read this License and accepted its conditions.

General Terms and Conditions

01. Although the non-commercial use of the Protocol takes place under the MIT License, in any case of commercial use, i.e. for profit and/or gain, you are obliged to apply only that part of the License which does not apply to the MIT License for non-commercial use.

02. This means that if you want to use the Protocol as well as any copying of it (whether at the architecture level and/or the specific implementations and/or parts of the code and/or in any other way), you must

02.01. Contact us at info@niftsy.io.

02.02. Specify the resources on which the Protocol shall be used: web-sites, mobile-applications, decentralized applications etc.

02.03. Specify the start (exact date) of use, purpose of use.

03. In the case of a violation of Art. 02 of this Section, the Administrator of the Protocol will be entitled to sue you in court (arbitration) in any jurisdiction and demand compensation for all types of losses: both real damage and lost profit, as well as a penalty of not less than 10 (ten) BTC (in the case of the jurisdiction of the dispute does not provide for the use of bitcoin as property, property rights and/or other civil rights object — indicate the equivalent in fiat currency of the jurisdiction)

04. At the same time we inform you that the task of the Protocol Administrator is only to ensure a fair and open market for all participants, not to create conditions for monopolistic exploitation of the opportunities through abusive copying in any form (type) of the Protocol by unscrupulous participants of this market.

05. The Protocol can be used commercially only after the final approval of the Protocol Administrator expressed in explicit form by e-mail notification and/or via a special page on the NIFTSY.io website.

MIT-licence (as part of the whole Licence)

02. This portion of the License permits the recipients of a copy of this software and associated documentation (hereinafter referred to as the Software) to use the Software without restriction, including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and the persons to whom this Software is provided, subject to the following conditions

02.01. Non-commercial use of the Protocol: including but not limited to: testing of the Protocol, use in non-commercial projects and in other cases where the Protocol is not used for generating income (profit) in any form(s).

02.02. The above copyright notice and these terms and conditions must be included WITH ALL copies or meaningful portions of this software.

03. DISCLAIMER. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT WILL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER DEMAND, INCLUDING IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE: THIS DISCLAIMER EXTENDS TO COMMERCIAL USE OF THE RECORD.

Acceptance of the License and/or parts of it

This part is about the acceptance of the terms and conditions of the licence:

01. Any use of the Protocol and/or its components and/or the architecture on any level, in any form, independently of the specific implementations, is deemed to be an acceptance of these license conditions in full and unconditionally.

02. Without the acts specified for commercial or non-commercial use of the Protocol described in the above License, no person is entitled to use this Protocol in full or in part.

03. Insofar this License may be amended in time, the Protocol Administrator will publish information about this amendment by any means available to the User and the general public (via the website, an application including — decentralised, by e-mail and/or by other means), and from that moment on all changes will be accepted by the user of the Protocol and/or its parts (elements) to the full extent and unconditionally.

Arbitration and other conditions

01. As we are proponents of Open Source Software, we welcome any auditing of our Protocol and we encourage white hat practices through native tokens of the Protocol.

02. In all cases of malicious use of the Protocol and/or adverse effect on the operation of the Protocol and/or its component(s), we will be entitled to sue the responsible person(s) in any jurisdiction and seek compensation for all damages: real damages, lost profits, and liquidated damages of not less than ten (10) BTC (in the event the jurisdiction in dispute does not provide for bitcoin as property, property rights and/or other civil rights object — the equivalent in fiat currency of that jurisdiction will be specified).

03. All possible questions on the Protocol and/or License you can ask via NIFTSY.io: the answer to the questions is provided within 3 (three) working days.

So should you be worried?

No, if you’re an honest, decent person and / or open project that does nothing to the detriment of others and bypasses the generally accepted norms and principles of morality, as well as the law (if we understand this not as law in the positive sense — as a set of rules laid down in the law and/or regulations, but just as some kind of natural law): in this case, everything will be fine.

Exactly you do not need to worry, if you are a startup using our protocol in your service/application and/or somewhere else and have obtained our permission for such integration and/or you do not get any direct financial benefit from copying the protocol.

Uniswap did something similar because what was happening with the liquidity markets in 2020–2021 was a real thriller that made many people sick to watch. We in no way encourage closed source and/or proprietary applications, much less consider “closed and semi-closed type” Dapps an oxymoron, something impossible in real life, but at the same time we don’t want old structures attacking innovation in their grandfatherly ways and therefore this license is a protection against the Dark Forces.

And may the Light Side of the Force be with you and to!