- There is a battle being fought for the dogecoin trademark, the Wall Street Journal reported.
- Dogecoin imitators number in the hundreds, trying to capitalize on the popularity of the original meme token.
- One company wants to take ownership of the original dogecoin and Dogecoin Foundation.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
A report in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday shed light on the fight that has erupted over who owns the trademark for dogecoin, the massively popular meme-based cryptocurrency with a $31 billion market capitalization.
Dogecoin was created in the span of hours as a joke in 2013, meant to poke fun at the then-nascent crypto space. A year later, the creators founded the Dogecoin Foundation but didn't file to register the trademark until this past August, according to the WSJ. Now, that application is just one among half a dozen vying for ownership of the dogecoin brand.
Among the nearly 100 crypto projects that now incorporate some use of the word 'doge' – including Baby Doge Coin and Dogelon Mars – one crypto market player is looking to take control of the original brand.
Angel Versetti, founder of a company called Moon Rabbit AngoZaibatsu LLC, said he created a new dogecoin on his firm's blockchain and registered a new company called the Dogecoin Foundation when he realized the original had not been active for some time. He made updates to the original dogecoin source code taken from the code sharing site GitHub.
The original Dogecoin Foundation has accused Versetti of trying to profit off of the "goodwill Dogecoin has built," according to the article, though Versetti insists the move is not malicious but intended to provide guidance to the token.
A trademark would allow the owners to shut down other crypto projects that share a similar name and might confuse market participants.
The trademark battle is the latest chapter in dogecoin's remarkable saga in 2021. Kicking off the first half year with a blistering rally and winning fans among the market elite including Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, the meme token is up 4,000% year to date even after a considerable pull back from all-time highs.
But in July, Jackson Palmer, one of the original creators, took to Twitter to offer a scathing rebuke of the wider cryptocurrency space and said he would never return to work again on the token he created.
"After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity," Palmer said in his Twitter thread.