“ZK” battle battle: The crypto industry is good TICKER and the context of attention

Author: 0xjs@0 作作作作作作

“Take a good name, the brand is half successful.”

In the encryption industry, the same is true of good TICKER.

Recently, the well -known ZKROLLLUP LAYER2 project ZKSYNC has caused the encrypted community to anger because of the Ticker name (Ticker) and trademarks.

The reason for all this is that ZKSYNC is finally issuing coins.

Reason: ZKSYNC chooses ZK as a token name to cause conflict

According to sources on May 21, 2024, ZKSYNC plans to hold a token generation activity in that week. Tokens issued (including airdrop) will be carried out within 30 days after TGE, with a total supply of 21 billion tokens.ZKSYNC tokens are expected to be carried out around June 13.

ZKSYNC hopes that its tokens will use ZK as their token name.But the problem is that another ZK project PoHedra has used the name and used this token name on some mainstream exchanges for transactions

Then Bybit announced on May 23 that it will adjust the Polyhedra token name and use ZK Sync on its spot trading platform.

On May 24th, Polyhedra publicly condemned the ZKSYNC token name selection.Name name “

On May 28, Polyhedra Network posted on the X platform, “ZKSYNC has never contacted us, ZKSYNC continues to spread rumors between different entities.The threat of Ticker’s capture, then the entire industry will become chaotic and bring major regulatory issues.

In fact,This is not the first time that ZKSYNC has encountered token names.In the previous cycle of 2021, the L2 project ZKSWAP used ZKS as the token name.ZKSYNC was misunderstood due to the possible misunderstanding of the ZKS token name and ZKSWAP.

Invoasant: ZKSYNC Development Company submitted ZK trademarks to lead public anger

On May 30, 2024, the conflict further intensified.

According to the market, ZKSYNC Development Company Matter Labs has been further based on the use of ZK as the token name. It has submitted a trademark application in nine countries to try to use “ZK” as the unique intellectual property of Matter Labs.

This angered the encryption industry.

Starkware, Algrand, Polygon, PolyHedra Network, Kakarot several ZK projects jointly issued a statement to condemn the behavior of Matter Labs.

This is obviously a company trying to occupy what it does not belong to it.ZK should maintain a public resources belonging to everyone.It should not become a company’s trademark, and it should be open to everyone.A company’s use of a legal system to annex public resources violates the spirit of cryptocurrency, the spirit of Ethereum, and academic spirit.They publicly called for the community to request the Matter Labs to withdraw all trademark applications and the use of the “ZK” token name.

The signing of the joint statement includes:

Shafi Goldwasser, the Turing Award winner, the co -inventor of the ZK proof, the scientific consultant of Starkware;

Silvio Micali, the co -inventor of the Turing Award, the co -inventor of the ZK certificate, the founder of AlgranD Technology;

Eli Ben-Sasson, Starkware CEO, Zcash founded scientist, ZK-Starks co-inventor;

Sandeep nailwal, co -founder of Polygon;

Tiancheng Xie, PolyHedra Network co -founder, ZKBridge inventor;

Brendan Farmer, co -founder of Polygon;

Elias Tazartes, co -founder of Kakarot;

Starkware CEO Eli Ben-Sasson posted a text in Twitter, “I created the mathematical term Stark, FRI, and Air. The establishment of Starkware, we have not registered for them. Mathematics is a public product. No company should claim it. Of courseCompanies that have been discovered in mathematics should not have it after 30 years. “

0xpolygon Labs Chief Law and Policy Officer Rebecca Rettig also criticized this ZK trademark application behavior. Trademarks protect the company brand, not public products.She believes that the application for trademarks for a widely used technical term for “ZK” violates the open -source nature of encryption technology.

Polygon’s official push also appealed to Matter Labs to withdraw all the universal trademark applications submitted.

Polygon Labs adheres to the true Ethereum spirit and continuously introduces open source code that benefits everyone.This promise has positively impact the entire encryption field.Polygon Plonky2 has been widely adopted, showing our huge benefits to the web3 community.Matter Labs is one of the beneficiaries,ZKSYNC’s core “ZK” technology stack uses Polygon Plonky2EssenceInitially, they did not declare appropriately when they used this technology developed by Polygon Labs until they were called out.Now they go further.Although it depends on other people’s ZK technology, Matter Labs now seek to register “ZK” as a trademark to potentially restrict others to use it.Should anyone be allowed to monopolize the mathematics knowledge provided by pioneers such as Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Charles Rackoff, Eli Ben-Sasson (Starks), or Daniel Lubarov (Plonky2, WEB3).Never.They may claim to do this for the benefit of users.But ask yourself: If a company monopolizes ZK technology, will users really benefit?If there is no ZK technology developed by Polygon Labs, will the ZKSYNC network still exist?Impossible.The “ZK” trademark will actually cause damage to users due to confusion.

The ZKEVM L2 project owned by Metamask’s parent company Consensys Linea also stood up to oppose Matter Labs ZK trademark application behaviorEssenceLinea said, “The use of legal frameworks to claim to have the right to develop universal and decentralized L2 execution environment, which violates the principle of Ethereum and why all of us here…Starkware’s statement, Matter Labs should withdraw their trademark attempts. “

May 30th,After a week after PolyHedra and ZKSYNC conflict on the “ZK” token name, PolyHedra announced that it would use the token name “ZKJ” when it was listed on Hashkey Global on May 31st when it was listed on Hashkey Global.And gradually change the tokens of the current exchanges to “ZKJ”.

Some netizens said: “Registering trademarks for ZK is the results of stealing other ZK developers.” “Registering air as a trademark will be an epic thing.”

Listen: The defense of Matter Labs

In response to the public statement of many ZK projects, Alex Gluchowski, the founder and CEO of Matter Labs, personally ended to defend the ZK trademark.

Matter Labs is an enthusiastic supporter of the values of free will, password punk spirit, and the values in ZK Credo.We reject the concept of “intellectual property rights”EssenceEverything we created was released to the public under the free open source license.

However,The existence of the trademark is to protect users, not the company.All the trademarks we have registered, including trademarks related to ZK, are defensiveTo prevent dishonest actors from misleading customers and confusing their products and services with the products and services provided by Matter Labs (unfortunately, this is the case in the past).

But ZK is the ultimate goal, so we go further.We have previously contacted the legal team of the Ethereum Foundation and proposed to cooperate to create a legal framework in order to use “ZK” and similar important technical terms in the public domain.We invite others to participate in this initiative -especially those who applied for trademarks related to Stark.

Some netizens also defended ZKSYNC.

The ZKSYNC team will ensure safety in sincerity and will publicize this publicly, because the Polyhedra clown threatens their release with market fluctuations, so I think the ZK team has no choice but to register it as a trademark.Use it.I believe that through such actions, their release will not be threatened by the Polyhedra team.

The current temporary result is that Polyhedra has failed to compete for ZK TICKER.butDue to the anger in the encryption industry, can ZKSYNC successfully obtain the ZK token name and ZK trademark,How to end the dispute is still to be observed.

A good ticker is to compete for attention

In fact,ZKSYNC and Polyhedra’s competition for the ZK token name and the controversy of ZKSYNC’s application of ZK trademarks have reflected how scarce the current encrypted market attention is, and each project wants to use TICKER to compete for people’s attention.

In modern society, everyone’s attention is limited.If you want to attract people’s attention and occupy people’s minds, a good name can achieve more effort.

From the perspective of the project party, the use of proprietary terms or nouns that has been occupied by the user’s mind as the tokens can be used as a token name, which can be “fame overnight”, which can also increase the “orthodox nature” of the project, and can also promote investor FOMO emotions.

Therefore, many tokens have appeared in the encryption industry as the name of special terms or terms.

This is the most obvious in the field of Meme.Use Meme to search at Coinmarkertcap, and 100 tokens will appear with Meme as the name.