Fast Lane name concerns

Community Chatroom (DISCUSSION)
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Hi everyone,

My name is Alex and I’m the CEO of Fast Lane Labs and the FastLane protocol. We’re an MEV protocol on polygon - currently 21% of blocks on polygon are mined by validators connected to the FastLane protocol. We also recently announced the FastLane ClearingHouse.

I was surprised when I saw the announcement today that bancor was launching a fast lane protocol. I received quite a few DMs asking if we had partnered up with you guys - which id love to do btw. But I was concerned - particularly because we intentionally misspell “Fastlane” as “Fast Lane” and “FastLane” which appears to be something you’ve also unintentionally mimicked.

I did some digging and noticed that the first governance proposal / mention of “fast lane” occurred shortly after one of our big marketing pushes surrounding our open beta launch. I suspect our marketing might have planted a subconscious seed - I’m sure the naming overlap was unintentional on your part.

I’m requesting that you change your protocol’s name. This would have a few key benefits:

  1. No confusion for FastLane protocol users who find themselves on the bancor site by mistake
  2. No confusion for bancor users who find themselves on the FastLane website by mistake
  3. A chance for a more applicable protocol name. The FastLane protocol charges fees to searchers to deliver their transactions more quickly to validators - just like a fastlane - whereas your arb protocol waives fees for its searchers.
  4. No trademark infringement. We genuinely like you guys and your protocol and your innovations and I’m lowkey excited that our name is becoming associated with arbitrage, but we have a duty to our shareholders to defend our trademark / brand.

If you have any questions or want to chat privately, please shoot me an email at [email protected]

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You have a protocol,a lab,a portal.
They just “named” a smart contract.

It’s not the name of a protocol,not the name of the company,it’s not a webpage,it’s just an acronym for a smart contract.To even use it,you need really high level tech knowledge,and if you have the knowledge you can’t confuse a website with a smartcontract that you have to install from github and do lot of terminal commands to run it.It’s not like someone could ever be confused about this.
It’s like being bothered and afraid of people being confused that a supermarket has the same name as my backyard pond.

Just my opinion,not being part of any of the teams.

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Why would you think a commonly used phrase like fast lane could be trademarked by you?
I’m sorry you feel like Bancor stole your name, but the word/phrase Fast Lane is very much so public domain.

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