Unicoin takes Uniswap to court over UNI trademark dispute

Unicoin has sued Uniswap Labs in New York federal court, seeking declarations that its UNICOIN brand does not infringe Uniswap's trademarks and asking the court to cancel Uniswap's federal UNI trademark registration.
Summary

• Unicoin has sued Uniswap Labs after receiving demands to stop using the UNICOIN name and transfer unicoin.com and unicoin.org.
• The lawsuit seeks a ruling that UNICOIN does not infringe Uniswap's UNI, UNISWAP or UNICHAIN marks.
• Unicoin wants Uniswap's federal UNI trademark registration canceled, arguing that UNI is generic or descriptive and widely used.
• Unicoin said Uniswap knew about its business for more than two years before raising trademark claims ahead of its planned offering.

Unicoin said in a Sept. 8 complaint shared with crypto.news and filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the dispute followed months of demands from Uniswap, which accused the company of trademark infringement, dilution, cybersquatting and unfair competition. Uniswap had known about Unicoin for at least two years before making its first trademark claims in June, according to the filing.

The lawsuit asks the court to rule that Unicoin can continue using its name and unicorn logo without infringing the UNISWAP, UNI or UNICHAIN marks. Unicoin is separately challenging U.S. Trademark Registration No. 7,307,721 for UNI, arguing that the term is generic or, at most, descriptive without acquired distinctiveness.

Unicoin lawsuit targets Uniswap's UNI trademark

The dispute began with a June 3 letter from Uniswap's lawyers demanding that Unicoin permanently stop using UNICOIN and other names containing UNI in connection with cryptocurrency, blockchain, decentralized finance or a decentralized ecosystem.

Uniswap demanded the transfer of unicoin.com and unicoin.org, an accounting of Unicoin's revenue and profits, reimbursement of its legal fees and an agreement preventing future use or registration of the disputed marks, according to the complaint.

Unicoin rejected the demands on June 23, telling Uniswap that it had independently developed the UNICOIN name and had continuously used it since 2021. Its lawyers argued that the brands had different appearances and commercial meanings and that widespread use of the UNI prefix weakened Uniswap's claim to exclusive rights over it.

Uniswap rejected that response on July 17 and maintained that UNICOIN was likely to cause confusion with UNISWAP, UNI and UNICHAIN. It warned that it would consider other legal remedies if the matter was not resolved to its satisfaction.
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Another exchange followed before Uniswap sent a final letter on Aug. 14. The complaint said Uniswap again demanded the removal of references to the UNICOIN token and told the company it would not continue the back and forth, while warning that legal remedies remained available.

Unicoin has now asked the court to settle the dispute before Uniswap brings an infringement case.

Unicoin says UNI is too common for exclusive protection

A central part of Unicoin's case challenges the strength of the UNI mark itself.

Uniswap owns a federal registration for UNI covering technology used to issue cryptocurrency tokens that holders can use to vote on and govern a blockchain protocol. The registration lists Sept. 16, 2020 as the first commercial use date and was registered in February 2024.

Unicoin argues that "uni" is a common prefix derived from the Latin word unus, meaning "one," and appears in words ranging from unit and union to universe, university and unicorn. Its complaint says more than 3,600 registrations in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database contain UNI, with approximately 1,000 currently live.

The company extended that argument to crypto, identifying several projects that use UNI or names beginning with the same letters. It said multiple unrelated cryptocurrencies have traded under the UNI ticker, while projects including Unibot, Unifi Protocol DAO, UniLend Finance and Unibright use similar naming conventions. Some UNI-formative crypto projects cited in the complaint predate Uniswap's September 2020 governance token.

Unicoin wants the court to cancel Uniswap's UNI registration on the grounds that UNI is generic or merely descriptive without secondary meaning and fails to function as an identifier of a single source. Because the registration is less than five years old, the complaint argues that it has not become incontestable under federal trademark law.

Unicoin disputes risk of consumer confusion

Unicoin has based another part of its case on differences between the two companies' products and branding.

Its complaint describes UNICOIN as an asset-backed cryptocurrency marketed under the tagline "The Smart Coin for Smart People," while Uniswap operates a decentralized exchange tied to its UNI governance token and Unichain blockchain. Unicoin said it had withdrawn plans for a separate governance token under the UNICOIN name and renamed a planned proprietary blockchain so it no longer used a UNI prefix.

The filing makes a similar distinction between the names themselves, arguing that UNICOIN refers to a digital coin, UNISWAP conveys trading or exchange, and UNICHAIN refers to blockchain infrastructure.

Unicoin said years of marketing by both companies had produced no known cases in which consumers asked whether it was connected with Uniswap. It claimed to have sold to thousands of investors and coinholders in more than 100 countries while spending millions of dollars on advertising, including Times Square billboards, buses, taxis and major industry events.

The complaint includes a side-by-side comparison of the companies' unicorn logos on page 14. Unicoin describes its design as angular and made from sharp lines, compared with the curved unicorn imagery used by Uniswap.

Trademark fight comes before Unicoin offering

Unicoin claims the timing of Uniswap's demands is significant because they arrived shortly before its planned public offering.

The company said Uniswap founder Hayden Adams had publicly commented on Unicoin in May 2024, showing that Uniswap knew about the business more than two years before sending its first infringement letter. According to the complaint, Adams wrote that Unicoin should face scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Unicoin characterized the comment as evidence of personal hostility, an allegation Uniswap has not yet answered in the case.

The SEC later brought its own case against Unicoin. As crypto.news previously reported, the regulator sued the company and several executives in May 2025, accusing them of raising more than $100 million through allegedly misleading and unregistered securities offerings. Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin denied the allegations and said the company would fight the case.

Uniswap has faced separate litigation and regulatory disputes. In March, a federal judge dismissed a class action that sought to hold Uniswap Labs responsible for alleged scam tokens and rug pulls traded through its protocol. Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the remaining claims with prejudice after earlier federal securities claims had been rejected.

A separate intellectual-property case brought by Bancor-linked entities ended in Uniswap's favor in February after they accused the company of infringing patents covering technology used in automated decentralized trading. The patent infringement case concerned the constant product automated market maker technology used by the protocol.

Uniswap had previously faced SEC scrutiny over allegations that it facilitated unregistered securities trading and operated as an unregistered broker-dealer. The agency ended its Uniswap investigation without taking enforcement action in February 2025.

In its latest lawsuit, Unicoin is seeking five forms of substantive relief covering non-infringement, dilution, cancellation of the UNI registration, cybersquatting and unfair competition. It wants declarations allowing continued use of UNICOIN and its domains, cancellation of Uniswap's UNI registration and an award of reasonable attorney fees and costs. Unicoin has demanded a jury trial on issues eligible to be tried by a jury.
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