Would the real USDP please stand up?Last month, Paxos, the issuer of the seventh-largest stablecoin in the $2 trillion global cryptocurrency market
Would the real USDP please stand up?
Last month, Paxos, the issuer of the seventh-largest stablecoin in the $2 trillion global cryptocurrency market, renamed the token, previously called the Paxos standard, to the Paxos dollar. As part of the rebranding, the crypto exchange changed the ticker symbol from PAX to USDP.
There was one hitch: Another stablecoin was already using the ticker.
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Unit Protocol, a decentralized lending platform that went live in February, had been calling its token USDP since at least July of last year, when it published a white paper. For a hot minute it seemed the plucky team was not about to let a bigger rival use the four-letter identifier without a fight.
“We are currently disputing Paxos’ trademark application for USDP,” Benjamin Meredith, a representative for Unit Protocol, told CoinDesk on Aug. 27.
To show that the original USDP was a known quantity in the market, Meredith pointed to blockchain data indicating that 138 million units of the token had been minted, each worth just under $1. He also shared writeups on the market data sites CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap as further evidence this stablecoin was an established asset – even if the Paxos stablecoin’s market cap was 7.5 times larger.
As of this writing, however, no formal objection was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In a later email, Meredith said the Unit Protocol team decided to first talk to a Paxos executive. Still later, he said the call didn’t happen.
“We’re just going to go along our merry way for the time being,” Meredith said.
Paxos, for its part, seemed unwilling to budge when contacted by CoinDesk. “It’s common for projects to share tickers in the cryptocurrency space,” said Paxos spokesperson Becky McClain. “There are dozens of instances of shared qtickers or tickers that share letter strings, and we feel confident these uses are distinguishable and coexist without confusion for consumers.” She did not answer a follow-up question about whether Paxos checked if the ticker was already in use before choosing it.
This anticlimactic tale highlights an issue that has come up a handful of times in crypto and may do so more often in the future as the industry grows. Without a standard for exchanges to assign identifiers, investors are apt to get confused.
“Tickers are designed to make assets instantly recognizable to clients, so it’s important each ticker refers to a single asset,” said Kevin Beardsley, lead product manager for pro trading at the Kraken exchange. “However, two projects sometimes claim the same symbol, and the winner is mostly decided de facto by the community.”
$ETH(an Allen)
Unlike a stock, which is usually listed on a single exchange that has final say over ticker assignments, a crypto asset can be bought and sold on hundreds of venues throughout the world.
“Whenever two, usually smaller, token projects claim the same ticker, it’s often the one [that] gains more public momentum and exchange listings early on that retains the symbol,” Beardsley said.
At Coinbase, “we take the issuer’s recommendation under advisement, but we have an opinion, too, as do all exchanges,” said a spokesperson for the crypto exchange powerhouse. “In case of conflicts, we’ve so far followed a first come, first serve model.”
(Coinbase itself ruffled feathers this year by choosing the ticker COIN for its watershed Nasdaq stock listing; Coinsilium, a blockchain investment firm, already used the identifier for its shares, which trade on the London-based Acquis Exchange.)
Another recent example of the problem was when Ethan Allen, a furniture retailer, changed its stock ticker to ETD from ETH to avoid confusion with ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Amazingly, a big run-up in Ethan Allen’s share price earlier this year had been attributed to retail traders mistaking the stock for the crypto. The furniture chain’s … ahem, the merchant’s CEO also said the ticker change would help with search traffic because people googling news about his company won’t end up wading through stories about the native token of the Ethereum blockchain.
Early crypto advocates saw that standards mattered. In 2014, the Bitcoin Foundation, then in its heyday, lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to make XBT the original cryptocurrency’s ticker symbol for foreign exchange.
Why not BTC, which even then was already the customary abbreviation? “The code XBT was selected because the prefix ‘X’ denotes a non-national affiliation or a monetary metal such as gold or silver,” explained Jon Matonis, one of the foundation’s leaders, in a CoinDesk op-ed at the time. “Technically, BTC would be unavailable due to the fact ‘BT’ already represents the…
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