Unicoin Sues Uniswap to Cancel UNI Trademark
TransparentBusiness Inc., operating under the name Unicoin, has filed a lawsuit against Universal Navigation Inc., operating under Uniswap Labs, in the Southern District of New York Federal Court, case number 1:26-cv-07703. The lawsuit seeks to confirm that the UNICOIN trademark does not infringe or dilute the claims of the UNI, UNISWAP, and UNICHAIN trademarks, and requests the cancellation of the U.S. registration of UNI.
The complaint was filed on September 8, with the case being a Lanham Act trademark dispute, and the plaintiff is requesting a jury trial. The complaint alleges that Uniswap's lawyers sent three letters on June 3, July 17, and August 14, claiming infringement, dilution, domain name squatting, and unfair competition, demanding the cessation of the use of UNICOIN and other identifiers containing UNI, the transfer of unicoin.com and unicoin.org, submission of income and profit accounts, and payment of the opposing party's attorney fees. The plaintiff also requests confirmation that the aforementioned domain names do not violate the federal Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
The cancellation request targets U.S. trademark registration number 7,307,721 for the standard character mark UNI, covering minting services and related software, claiming a first use date of September 16, 2020, with a notice published on December 5, 2023, and approval for registration on February 20, 2024. The plaintiff argues that UNI is a Latin prefix meaning "one," and is merely descriptive or generic, with approximately a thousand valid registrations containing UNI in the U.S., and at least three unrelated tokens trading under the same name, thus it cannot identify a single source; the registration has not been in effect for five years and has not acquired incontestable status. The complaint also states that the opposing party has been aware of Unicoin's operations for at least two years and only asserted rights after sending the letters, constituting laches.
The timing falls before the public launch of the UNCN token listed on the Unicoin website on September 28. According to DeFiLlama's statistics at the time, the Uniswap protocol was still the top decentralized exchange by 24-hour trading volume, exceeding $3.9 billion. The defendant's New York address is listed at 228 South Park Avenue. At the time of filing, there has been no substantive ruling, and Uniswap has not provided a complete response in public reports.
The plaintiff, TransparentBusiness/Unicoin, has other public litigation records, including a securities fraud lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Unicoin and related individuals in 2025, as well as civil cases from investors against predecessor companies. This lawsuit is a defensive confirmation action, escalating the cease-and-desist letters into a request for a federal court ruling on the validity of the trademark and the legality of the domain names.
In market mechanisms, this represents legal risk pricing, not a transfer of protocol traffic. Buyers need to obtain a "coexistence" judicial statement from the project before issuing tokens; sellers hold the UNI registration and have issued cease and desist and domain transfer demands from a leading DEX operating entity. Funds will first flow to attorney fees and potential settlement amounts, rather than liquidity pools. The beneficiary is the party that can frame the brand conflict as a justiciable issue; the party under pressure is the planned token issuance timeline, and if the UNI registration is successfully challenged, it may affect the subsequent brand extension of the Uniswap trademark portfolio. The event is driven by three letters rather than changes to on-chain products.
On a supplementary level, the judge is registered as Edgardo Ramos, and a subpoena application and trademark case AO-120 form have been submitted, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to receive case notification. The court has not yet ruled on the non-infringement statement or cancellation of registration.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Unicoin did not wait to be sued but instead preemptively turned the cease-and-desist letters into a confirmation lawsuit before the token issuance window, aiming not just to protect the four syllables of UNICOIN but to directly challenge the protectability of the UNI registration. This differs from many crypto projects that change names after receiving cease-and-desist letters: the plaintiff chose to attack the notion that "UNI cannot identify a single source," framing the leading DEX's token abbreviation as a generic suffix. TransparentBusiness also enters the Southern District of New York with public burdens such as the SEC fraud lawsuit, indicating that the trademark battle is viewed as a legal obstacle that must be cleared before issuance, rather than a primary battleground for brand building.
The capital path involves using litigation budgets to exchange for issuance licensing space. The three letters demand the transfer of domain names, submission of accounts, and cessation of all variations of UNI, effectively shutting down traffic entry points like unicoin.com and the upcoming UNCN narrative. The lawsuit shifts negotiations from lawyer letters to a federal procedure that can request cancellation of registration; once discovery begins, both parties will need to provide evidence regarding usage history, confusion evidence, and delayed claims. Money flows to law firms and potential settlements rather than market making. The motivation is that the September 28 timeline does not allow for a name change.
In contrast to the tug-of-war over the TON brand between Telegram and Pavel Durov, and the numerous "prefix plus coin" projects rejected by the USPTO: once a DEX token abbreviation is federally registered, it will be used to clear adjacent naming. The industry phase belongs to control—leading protocols begin to manage ecological naming rights using the Lanham Act, while later projects counter with "genericity + laches." Uniswap's daily trading volume remains the highest among DEXs, and the trademark battle runs parallel to product lines, indicating that brand assets have been treated as an executable moat.
Structural changes belong to the intersection of regulatory changes and the transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is: federal trademark registration turns on-chain tickers into prosecutable proprietary names, and a letter can force later projects to halt before launch; a confirmation lawsuit places the same registration in a revocable status. Whoever can prove that "UNI only points to Uniswap" will have the exclusionary rights to the UNI word family; whoever can prove it is merely a prefix can reopen the naming space. Market transactions will not relocate as a result, but issuance rights and domain rights will first be priced by legal processes.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- A cease-and-desist letter buys the right to halt, while a confirmation lawsuit buys the right to launch.
- Once an abbreviation is registered, ecological naming becomes a prosecutable asset.
- The closer the token issuance timeline, the more the trademark battle resembles a prerequisite for financing.