Meshcore Legal Battle

Whilst Meshcore is hardly the place for intelligent exchanges of messages, being rather like CB radio of old in content, it is a treasure-trove of scandal in recent months.

The reason? A team split, where one of the members of team Meshcore filed his own trademark application, allegedly without notifying the team itself. 

The split, down to Andy Kirby, has caused a lot of ill-feeling and, on Meshcore itself, anger and not a little abuse. Kirby issued a YouTube video defence of his actions, but though there are many words, it achieves nothing by way of explanation.

The Meshcore team have opted to challenge the trademark filing, which will of course be expensive - for them as well as Kirby, should he defend the challenge. 

From time to time, a link is sent as a message on Meshcore, inviting people to visit and donate to the legal costs. This takes you to a blog post, explaining why they don't simply change the name to something else and have decided to follow the legal route - and how much that will likely cost. 

As you can see, they had initial cost of $15,000, with further costs then identified of $18,000; a total of $33,000. 

It seems that, within just 12 days, Meshcore supporters had already donated $41,283 at the time of writing this post (15th July). 

Fundraiser total as of 15:55UTC, July 5, 2026.

 

Whilst there is no suggestion or claim of wrongdoing, with over $8000 in excess of what was being sought already, I think a fair question would be: how is that excess to be managed and spent? It's not at all clear that this is explained in the blog or elsewhere. The blog post text only seems to contemplate a situation where there is not enough money raised, or they decide the challenge isn't viable (one might hope this had been assessed prior to the fundraiser, but there are, admittedly, plenty of unknowns as one progresses down a legal route). $41,283, at the time of writing, seems a very large amount of money for 'bug bounties', should the claim not proceed.

Perhaps the team have received donations way in excess of what they expected to achieve. And they do mention supporting the overall project from funds raised, not only 'bug bounties'. But it all seems a bit nebulous to me, and some greater clarity - as well as an update to the blog, which still claims only $1800 has been raised - would seem necessary, especially as trust is at the heart of all this shenanigans.