PayPal And Western Union Submit Crypto Trademark Applications

Traditional finance behemoths PayPal and Western Union have filed trademark applications for a wide range of digital assets services.

Each of these firms submitted three new trademark applications for crypto services to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Notably, PayPal’s trademark applications are also for the payment overlapping P’s logo.

According to Mike Kondoudis, a USPTO-licensed trademark attorney who announced the filings via Twitter, “PayPal has filed trademark applications for Paypal and its ‘overlapping Ps’ logo. The apps claim plans for exchanging, trading, and processing transfers of blockchain + digital assets, crypto + digital + virtual currencies … and more.”

Currently, PayPal with its crypto checkout service supports the use of four different digital currencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) amongst others on its e-commerce platform. PayPal customers in the United States and all U.S territories excluding Hawaii are permitted to complete their transactions with any of the mentioned digital currencies. 

The introduction of the Super App for crypto transactions also expanded the digital assets ecosystem of PayPal. From these new trademark filings, it is likely that the payment company will launch a Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. Earlier this year, PayPal confirmed that it has plans to launch its stablecoin

An excerpt from one of the trademark applications outlined what the trademark covers;

“Downloadable software for sending, receiving, accepting, buying, selling, storing, transmitting, trading and exchanging digital currency, virtual currency, cryptocurrency, stablecoins, digital and blockchain assets, digitized assets, digital tokens, crypto tokens, and utility tokens,” the excerpts explained.

Financial Service Providers Seek Crypto Trademark

For the Western Union application which was submitted on the same day as PayPal, Konduodis tweeted “Western Union has filed 3 trademark applications claiming plans for financial + banking + insurance, virtual currency exchange + transfer, commodity and crypto trading + brokerage, issuing tokens of value … and much more.”

Western Union has joined the bandwagon as this seems to be a time when applications for trademarks for crypto services are on the rise. Similarly, the payment service providing company Mastercard submitted a similar filing with USPTO but this time around, the application was meant for 15 NFTs and metaverse trademarks.