Unsurprisingly, Kanye West isn't a big fan of new "Coinye West" digital currency
Despite his love of seeing his name on things, Kanye West is not a fan of Coinye West. The rapper’s lawyers have issued a cease and desist to the startup behind the digital currency—which is kind of like Bitcoin, but with a more pop-culture-and-Kardashian-friendly moniker. Coinye launched last week, reportedly inspired by a chatroom joke.
Kanye’s legal team is demanding that the currency’s creators stop all use of the phrases “Coinye” and “Coinye West,” and is furthermore pushing for the site and all its social media outlets to shut down completely. One of his attorneys, Brad Rose, tells the Wall Street Journal that, “given Mr. West’s wide-ranging entrepreneurial accomplishments, consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Mr. West is the source” of the digital currency. (West could also be pissed that he didn’t think of it first.) Rose says that if Coinye West’s creators don’t comply, he’ll “pursue all legal remedies against any business that accepts the purported Coinye West currency.”
The move comes as no surprise to Coinye West’s seven anonymous creators, who told Noisey well before all this happened that they planned to stay anonymous “in case Kanye gets pissed off”—which, of course, he did. However, one of the site’s coders tells the Wall Street Journal today that the Coinye team remains undeterred, and still want to “release it public before the man can try to crush it.”