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An application by Mater Labs to register “ZK” as a trademark received a strong response from competitors StarkWare, Algorand and Polygon.
“We strongly condemn this behavior as a clear attempt by a corporation to claim ownership over something that does not belong to it,” the team said in a statement posted on GitHub yesterday. “We speak as some ZK or zero-knowledge cryptographers, academic cartographers and ZK researchers and developers of leading projects.”
Registering a trademark takes at least a year, but applicants can (and do) use proof of an application approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office for commercial purposes. Matter Labs, which developed the zkSync technology, filed the application in February.
The rival group, Matter Labs, has requested that the pending application be submitted to exchanges and allowed to “list the token under the token ZK name.”
ZK, or zero-knowledge, proofs were first described in a 1985 MIT research paper: “Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems”. They have become popular among cryptocurrency projects because they keep internal data sets private while still being used Smart contract Applications. For example, a protocol allows a user to see if they have enough money to complete a transaction without revealing exactly how much is in their wallet.
Matt Labs, meanwhile, applied for its trademark, saying it “can be used freely” in connection with ZK Sync, ZK Stack and other related technologies. “Like it or not,” the group tweeted last night, “trademarks are the only legal tool for this today.”
In the Mater Labs application, the signatory (Mater Labs General Counsel Geoff Thompson) says that the company believes that it “owns the trademark” and that “no one else” has the right to use the mark in commercial activities.
The tweet has faced another round of criticism.
“This is the ring,” writes Will Chen, founder and CEO of Idyllic Labs. And Rebecca Rettig, Polygon Labs' chief legal officer at Mater Labs, explored the reasons why it filed the application in the first place.
“If a challenge compels you to apply for TM, please state so,” she wrote on Twitter. “Otherwise [this] It is baseless. You don't need a ‘framework' to allow others to use the word b/c everyone can use it with your permission.”
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