Steem’s hard fork, HIVE, will have to deal with legal issues only days after its creation. According to an announcement from earlier today, a Canadian blockchain company with the same name had filed a cease and desist letter to the new network.
After the controversy between Justin Sun and Steem spiraled on, the latter’s community members decided to launch a new blockchain dubbed HIVE. To do so, they implemented a hard fork of the existing Steem code on Friday.
While the fork was executed successfully, the new project is having legal troubles already, because of its name.
Vancouver-based HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. informed earlier today that its legal representation is requesting from Steem’s hard fork platform to stop using the same name.
According to the document, identical names for companies in the same field will result in lots of confusion and could potentially harm the branding of both.
“We are a strong supporter of innovation within blockchain technology, and we have no issue with the proposed blockchain beyond its name, nor do we have any opinion on its reported disputed related to Steem.
However, for legal reasons, we have no option but to seek to protect our interests, dispel the ongoing confusion and avoid any potential damage to our reputation. We are hopeful this can be easily resolved with a name change.” – Said Frank Holmes, Interim Executive Chairman at the Canadian firm.
Holmes also added that if the new HIVE-called project continues using the name, it will be regarded as evidence of “intentionally predatory, misleading, and fraudulent strategy.”
On a separate and more positive note, the popular cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex announced that it will list the new blockchain after the successful hard fork.
More importantly, for the HIVE’s community, its price is already trading with a 15% premium over Steem. At the time of this writing, the former trades at around $0.187, while the latter is at $0.158.
The company also said in a post-fork statement that they are collaborating with several other major platforms as well.
“There are six more exchanges who are working on the airdrops, with some of them also working on a listing. However, these things do need to be done safely and take a lot of behind the scenes tech support, so please note that this process can take a little while.”
With that being said, it’s interesting to follow if HIVE will indeed change its project name and if that would delay any additional developments from the new blockchain.