Unicoin filed a Sept. 8 complaint in the Southern District of New York seeking cancellation of Uniswap Labs' federal UNI trademark registration, arguing the prefix is generic and widely used across more than 3,600 USPTO filings. The challenge hinges on the mark's February 2024 registration date, which leaves it short of the five-year incontestability threshold. Unicoin's own UNCN token launch is set for Sept. 28.
Unicoin asked a New York federal court on Sept. 8 to cancel U.S. Trademark Registration No. 7,307,721, the federal UNI mark Uniswap Labs has held since February 2024, arguing the three-letter prefix is too common to belong to one company.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, follows three demand letters from Uniswap's lawyers dated June 3, July 17 and Aug. 14 that accused Unicoin of trademark infringement, dilution, cybersquatting and unfair competition. Uniswap demanded that Unicoin stop using the UNICOIN name, transfer the unicoin.com and unicoin.org domains, account for its revenue and profits, and reimburse legal fees.
"Uni is a common prefix derived from the Latin word unus, meaning one," Unicoin's lawyers wrote in the filing, citing more than 3,600 registrations in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database that contain UNI, of which roughly 1,000 remain live. Uniswap Labs has not publicly commented on the lawsuit.
The registration's age is the hinge of the case. Uniswap's UNI mark lists Sept. 16, 2020 as its first commercial use date and was registered in February 2024, leaving it under the five-year threshold at which a federal registration becomes incontestable. Unicoin argues that because the mark has not reached incontestability, it remains open to a cancellation challenge on the grounds that UNI is generic or merely descriptive without acquired secondary meaning.
Unicoin's filing names Unibot, Unifi Protocol DAO, UniLend Finance and Unibright as projects using similar naming conventions, and says several unrelated cryptocurrencies have traded under the UNI ticker, some predating Uniswap's governance token. Uniswap's registration covers technology used to issue cryptocurrency tokens that holders can use to vote on and govern a blockchain protocol.
Unicoin's second line of argument is that consumers are not confused. The complaint describes UNICOIN as an asset-backed cryptocurrency marketed under the tagline "The Smart Coin for Smart People," against Uniswap's decentralized exchange, its UNI governance token and the Unichain blockchain. Unicoin said it withdrew plans for a separate governance token under the UNICOIN name and renamed a planned proprietary blockchain so it no longer carried a UNI prefix.
The filing includes a side-by-side comparison of the two companies' unicorn logos on page 14, describing Unicoin's design as angular and built from sharp lines against Uniswap's curved imagery. Unicoin said it has sold to thousands of investors and coinholders across more than 100 countries and spent millions of dollars on advertising, including Times Square billboards, buses, taxis and industry events, without a known instance of a consumer asking whether it was connected to Uniswap.
Timing is the third pillar. Unicoin says Uniswap founder Hayden Adams publicly commented on the company in May 2024, more than two years before the first infringement letter, and characterized the remark as evidence of personal hostility. Unicoin's UNCN token launch is scheduled for Sept. 28, weeks after the complaint was filed.
Uniswap enters the dispute with a favorable litigation record. A federal judge dismissed a class action over alleged scam tokens and rug pulls traded through its protocol in March, and a patent case brought by Bancor-linked entities ended in Uniswap's favor in February. The SEC closed its investigation into Uniswap without enforcement action in February 2025.
Unicoin's own regulatory position is less settled. The SEC sued the company and several executives in May 2025, accusing them of raising more than $100 million through allegedly misleading and unregistered securities offerings. CEO Alex Konanykhin denied the allegations and said the company would fight the case.
The commercial stakes sit with Uniswap's brand rather than its cash flow. Uniswap generated $66.8 million in protocol fees in the week before the suit was filed, second only to Tether among crypto protocols, and its annualized UNI burn rate has passed $250 million. The protocol ranked first among decentralized exchanges by daily trading volume at the time of filing, with more than $3.9 billion, according to DefiLlama.
Losing the federal registration would not force Uniswap to abandon the UNI ticker, but it would strip the presumption of nationwide exclusivity that a registered mark carries and make future enforcement against similarly named projects harder and more expensive. Unicoin is seeking five forms of relief: declarations of non-infringement, a ruling on dilution, cancellation of the UNI registration, a finding on cybersquatting, and an award of attorney fees and costs. It has demanded a jury trial on issues eligible to be tried by one.
UNI traded at Rp105,590, down 13.07%, according to the Pluang market feed, with the token already under pressure from a broader altcoin drawdown. The next scheduled date on the calendar is Sept. 28, when Unicoin's UNCN token is due to launch — the event the company says Uniswap's demands were timed to disrupt.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
