The American supermarket chain Trader Joe’s is taking legal action in California, filing a lawsuit against an encryption platform called “Trader Joe” and its co-founder Cheng Chieh Liu, accusing them of deliberately choosing similar names to gain commercial benefits from the supermarket brand and reputation.
Trader Joe is the decentralized exchange with the highest TVL on the public chain Avalanche. It conducts token swaps, liquidity mining, native token staking and NFT market transactions through automated market makers (AMM).
Trader Joe’s, a supermarket chain headquartered in California, was founded in 1958 and has 540 stores across every state in the United States.
Lawyers for Trader Joe’s said the decentralized exchange created a story around the fictional “Trader Joe’s” that is closely tied to the supermarket’s brand. The iconic character wears a red hat, which also highly overlaps with the main color of the supermarket brand, red.
According to Blockworks, its co-founder Cheng Chieh Liu is a Chinese citizen living in Singapore. He registered the controversial domain traderjoexyz.com, using the Trader Joe’s name without seeking or obtaining Trader Joe’s permission. Name their platform.
The lawyers also said that their concealment of their identities from the outside world and each other in their daily business transactions demonstrated that they did not want to be discovered and intended to subvert the legal process and conduct business without facing legal consequences.
According to tokenterminal, Trader Joe was founded by an anonymous team and launched in 2021.
Trader Joe’s supermarket chain is asking for a court order forcing the cryptocurrency company to stop using its name in its business operations, and is seeking ownership of the domain and any additional damages determined through legal proceedings.