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Ripple Labs Inc., issuers of the XRP cryptocurrency, has filed for a new trademark called “Paystring” with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
The trademark was filed on Nov. 6 and accepted on Friday, according to the USPTO website.
Although Ripple did not specify which sort of business will fall under the new product, it is notable that the trademark’s registration description matches that of PayID, a trademark it registered on June 17, word for word.
Both the official description for Paystring and PayID read: “[The]…trademark registration is intended to cover the categories of electronic financial services, namely, monetary services for receiving and disbursing remittances and monetary gifts in fiat currencies and virtual currencies over a computer network and for exchanging fiat currencies and virtual currencies over a computer network.”
Even the Paystring logo looks identical to that of PayID. It consists of a stylized circle design with four lines of various colors radiating from it.
Based on these findings, we can hazard to speculate that Paystring is a payment service, one directly designed to replace controversy-ridden PayID, and to help avoid the Australian court fight.
San Francisco-based Ripple will indeed be keen to dispense with PayID. In August, the firm was sued in an Australian court for allegedly infringing a trademark belonging to several local banks.
The lawsuit filed by the New Payments Platform Australia (NPPA), a joint venture between the Reserve Bank of Australia and 13 domestic banks, claims that Ripple copied its PayID brand.
NPPA’s service has been in existence for more than two years, helping to facilitate instant payments across 68 million Australian bank accounts. Ripple launched its cross-border payments service, also called PayID, in June, in partnership with 40 businesses.
