Dogecoin is being sued over its name

A dispute has ensued over who claims the dogecoin name?

Dogecoin is a digital currency that is widely regarded as having a hilarious aspect of the cryptocurrency universe. Originally designed as a joke in a handful of hours, dogecoin pays homage to a 2013 viral internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog with bad spelling habits thus doge instead of dog Meant by its creators to be worthless, dogecoin vaulted into crypto stardom this year thanks to a push from Tesla Inc. CEO and digital currency talisman Elon Musk.

At its May peak, dogecoin, a coin that has an obvious supply and no obvious use, was worth more than $80 billion. Its current market value is around $31 billion.

With that came a hoard of similarly named projects and a battle over who owns the trademark to Dogecoin.

The Dogecoin Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit founded by the creators and supporters in 2014, didn t file an official claim on the dogecoin brand name until late August. Its filing now sits next half a dozen others before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, all vying for the exclusive use of the brand Dogecoin, which has sprung up on applications to use it for baby blankets and men's suits.

Generally, most believed that it s not worth registering those trademarks because who knows how long these would survive. Now in the last hour, we are destroying that a little bit, said Jens Wiechers, a dogecoin Foundation board member. The group, which was relaunched for several years defunct in August, became defunct again

Mr. Musk hasn t replied to a request for comment. He has appointed a representative on his behalf who advises the Dogecoin Foundation Board. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk tweeted a photo of his new Shiba Inu puppy named Floki.

According to CoinMarketCap.com, there are now almost 100 cryptocurrency coins with the logo or ticker doge. What are some new projects for 2017 including Dogelon Mars and Doge's Coin.

On 24 May, a Cook Islands-based company Moon Rabbit AngoZaibatsu LLC applied for dogecoin trademarks in the U.S. and the European Union.

AngoZaibatsu s founder Angel Versetti said that he created a new dogecoin on his company's blockchain network when he noticed that the original Dogecoin Foundation was not working anymore. He says he built the original open source dogecoin code, which can be downloaded from Microsoft Corp. s GitHub file, a cloud-based code sharing platform.

Mr. Versetti said he created another horse/skin charity named the Dogecoin Foundation this year. The Cook Islands-based Dogecoin Foundation reported last month that the Colorado-based Pug in the Hood County attempting to profit unfairly off of the goodwill Dogecoin has built. I am not doing it with any malicious intent, Mr. Versetti said. We thought it was abandoned, we thought it desperately needed guidance. I can't make a U-turn just because the big kid came back to the playground. The absurdity over the dogecoin brand has struck many in the cryptocurrency ecosystem as ironic. The ethos of distributed ownership rests on cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was built so that it was owned by nobody.

The U.S. hasn't officially used bitcoin as a crypto trademark for the name bitcoin to commerce. The brand of the second-most popular Ethereum token, ether, is controlled by the French blockchain company that creates the coin and its cryptocurrency network.

Luckycoin itself was originally created by copying and tweaking another open source crypto project called Dogecoin. Luckycoin was a tweaked version of Litecoin which was a tweaked version of bitcoin. On Monday, a fake news release purportedly from Walmart Inc. claimed the retail giant would allow customers to make payments with Litecoin, a relatively new cryptocurrency. It s a copy of a copy, said Herr Versetti of the dogecoin. A valuable code is in the code itself. It exists purely for its community and not for any technological reasons. By obtaining a trademark, crypto projects can prevent and stop other organizations from creating products that could confuse users as to the brand backing it.

The original dogecoin effort may have an inherent claim to the name as it has been being used as a wallet for nearly a decade, said Caroline Simons, a corporate partner at the firm Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe LLP, who specializes in intellectual property law and isn t involved in the dispute. Trademarks can take longer than a year to be approved.

In August, a lawyer for the Dogecoin Foundation of Colorado had sent a letter to a project called Dogecoin 2.0. She demanded changes to Dogecoin 2.0's name, Internet domain and other materials within three days. Why is there that Mr. Wiechers argued the name could be mistaken as a second version of the dogecoin project?

Doge has positioned itself from day one against the establishment and now they ve become it, said Cam Geary, the project's creator. There are over 9,000 other dogecoin projects. Why come they come after us? Dogecoin 2.0, says he seeks to eliminate a longstanding divide in the dogecoin community: whether to cap the number of dogecoin in circulation as a way to enhance its value. The project, which bills itself as dogecoin but is upgraded, has capped the number of dog coins to be created at 100 million.

Dogecoin shouldn't be surprised by so many spinoffs, since it is one itself, said Chris Bendiksen, head of research at London-based asset management firm CoinShares.

It was going to have copycats or copydoges. It is the nature of space, he said. It is very hard to joke around and do satire at school these days. The whole world is almost turned into a joke.