The lead developer behind anonymity-focused cryptocurrency Zcash has decided against sharing its trademark with the not-for-profit Zcash Foundation.
Zcash Trademark Dispute
According to an official blog post published on Sept. 2, the Zcash Foundation has notified the community over Electronic Coin Company’s (ECC) refusal to share their trademark. The post claims that the decision to withhold sharing the trademark across organizations with a similar intent to promote zcash has harmed the ecosystem and resulted in a “decentralization theater.”
The Zcash Foundation bills itself as an altruistic aid for the growth and adoption of ZEC, while criticizing the for-profit developer ECC for reneging on their original agreement over the trademark.
Speaking at the Zcon1 conference held in Croatia in June, ECC CEO Zooko Wilcox claimed his company intended to share the trademark with the Zcash Foundation, calling it a 2-of-2 controlling agreement,
“To make control over the Zcash trademark be shared between the Foundation and the company. We’re working on the legal implementation of that to make it legally enforceable. We already have an agreement in principle.”
However, last week ECC openly announced that trademark negotiations had fallen through. The Zcash Foundation’s members expressed their frustration with the situation, saying,
“The Foundation was not established to engage in decentralization theater, and we will not lend our credibility to legitimize a hollow process.”
The press release concluded by asking ECC to reconsider its stance on the trademark and to focus on the broader zcash community.
