Crypto Long & Short: The Trouble With Ticker Symbols

[Gunnar Larson]

Would the real USDP please stand up
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth#Basic_rules>?

Last month, Paxos, the issuer of the seventh-largest
<https://www.coingecko.com/en/stablecoins> stablecoin
<https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/12/29/what-is-a-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
<https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/08/24/paxos-renames-standard-stablecoin-as-pax-dollar/'>
the
ticker symbol from PAX to USDP.

There was one hitch: Another stablecoin was already using the ticker.

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
<https://github.com/unitprotocol/protocol_docs/blob/master/unit_wp.pdf>.
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
<https://etherscan.io/tx/0x381ec163ca4031a142a79e86f9218b3b2e6a56e591b5a1962084f778ae1c624b>
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
<https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usdp> and CoinMarketCap
<https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usdp/> 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.”

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/09/05/crypto-long-short-the-trouble-with-ticker-symbols/
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