In brief
- Western Union said on Wednesday that the publicly announced new coin would be called USDPT.
- The WUUSD trademark application is being reviewed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
- The payments giant has said it plans to introduce a “digital asset network.”
Western Union has applied to trademark the name “WUUSD” shortly after announcing plans to issue its own USD-pegged stablecoin on the Solana blockchain in the first part of 2026.
The move comes despite Western Union saying that the publicly announced new coin, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, would be called USDPT.
A trademark filing for the term USDPT was also found in the USPTO database, and WUUSD has not yet been publicly mentioned in Western Union’s announcements.
According to the USPTO filing, the WUUSD trademark application has been accepted by the office and has met the minimum filing requirements but has not yet been examined for approval. US trademark approvals usually take several months, depending on their complexity.
The filing says that the WUUSD trademark may be used for stablecoin payment processing, payments processing, and foreign currency exchange.
In an announcement, the payments giant said it plans to introduce a “digital asset network” creating “real-world utility for digital assets,” without giving much extra detail or saying if this ecosystem could include other tokens or overlapping projects.
Decrypt has contacted Western Union about the WUUSD trademark filing.
Multiple Stablecoins?
Many crypto asset firms, such as Tether or Circle, issue multiple stablecoins pegged to different assets such as the dollar, euro, Chinese yuan, or commodities such as gold. Others, such as Paxos (USDP and PYUSD) and Binance (BUSD and FDUSD), have debuted similar coins under different issuers or reserve structures. Sometimes the same stablecoin hosted on different blockchains can have different tickers.
Rajiv Sawhney, head of international portfolio management at Wave Digital Assets, thinks the mysterious filing may be a simple branding issue. He says WUUSD could be “the public-facing ticker or symbol, while USDPT remains the regulatory and issuance name used in filings and technical contracts.”
Sawhney adds that Western Union may have “figured that USDPT is a clunky, unrecognizable name, while Western Union USD is much more recognizable.” However, he admits the true cause of the move is “hard to say at this point.”
In a Myriad prediction market, more than 50% of respondents believe that the stablecoin market value will hit $360 billion before February. Myriad is a unit of Dastan, the parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.
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