Who Owns Dogecoin? A multi-billion dollar battle for trademark rights has broken out
Wrestling over the Dogecoin brand. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)
Several organizations are said to claim the rights to the hyped fun currency Dogecoin. Apparently the Dogecoin Foundation had forgotten to register the trademark.
Jackson Palmer, who founded Dogecoin in 2013 together with Billy Markus as a parody of the Bitcoin, has not been a fan of cryptocurrencies for a long time. Most recently, he cursed digital money as “right-wing, hyper-capitalist technology”. According to his own statements, Palmer did not earn a cent with Dogecoin – even though the fun currency is currently one of the ten most important crypto currencies with a market capitalization of 31 billion dollars. Now there is a dispute over the rights to the Dogecoin brand.
Apparently, the Dogecoin Foundation had failed to apply for the trademark rights to its own crypto currency by August 2021. Accordingly, there are currently almost 100 crypto projects related to Dogecoin – including Baby Doge Coin, like Business Insider citing a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) writes. Meanwhile, a dozen organizations or people are said to be fighting over the lucrative trademark rights.
Anyone who came into possession of these rights would have the right to prohibit competing projects from using the name – or to have them paid dearly. In the case of Dogecoin, according to the WSJ, the company Moon Rabbit Angozaibatsu is said to have created a new Dogecoin and registered a company under the name Dogecoin Foundation. Company boss Angel Versetti, who wrote in Forbes magazine in 2019 in the “30 under 30” ranking for the European financial sector has also updated the original Dogecoin code – which is available for developers on Github.
According to its own information, Versetti did this because there were no more updates from the official Dogecoin Foundation. The latter in turn accuses Versetti of only wanting to make profit with the name Dogecoin. The latter, on the other hand, emphasizes that he only wants the best for the Dogecoin. The rights to the brand (trademark) also have other applicants in their sights, such as one Brief research at the US patent office shows. It remains to be seen who will ultimately be awarded the contract.
