# ERC404 issue: „No obvious correlation to official ERCs“

Source: https://github.com/0xacme/ERC404/issues/2
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/ERC404-issue-No-obvious-correlation-to-official-ERCs?index=0x65c7ca0af4d97ebde7d82b6fefea6e4338671f08d6ce8a001eb333dcc28172772b572d4b
Submitted by tim on 2024-02-10 UTC, 8 upvotes, 1 comment

## Summary

A commenter argues that naming the ERC404 project "ERC-404" misleads people, because the ERC label is widely understood to mean a structured standards process and the project has not gone through that process. The commenter says the objection is not about trademarks or numbering, but that the name made the project look like an official ERC, and that many crypto media outlets now describe it as a standard even though it is not yet a proposal. The commenter adds that they support innovation but want the naming to be non-misleading.

## Article

I'm sorry but that misses the point. This is nothing to do with trademarks or authorities, and no one claimed that this infringed any trademark or other legal construct. It's also not about assigning numbers.

It's about taking a term which is widely understood across the whole community to mean a specific, highly structured process, and then using that term to refer to something which completely ignores that process.

This project could have been called XYZ-404, or PQR-404, or a million other things, but the author chose to call it ERC-404 instead. Was that a coincidence? Of course not. Whether or not the intention was to deliberately mislead people into thinking it was a real ERC, that was the effect achieved. Now there are numerous crypto media outlets all referring to ERC-404 as a standard, when it's not yet even a proposal for a standard. This gives a dangerous veneer of credibility to something which hasn't earned it yet.

I'm all for innovation, and of course it's fine for anyone to publish stuff no matter how polished it is. Just please don't do it in a misleading way.

## Comments

**macbudkowski.eth**: Regardless of the legal POV (I agree with Tim's point re: defensive trademark), I think it's not ethical to use the ERC name when your token standard hasn't been really tested and approved by the community.

That's because many people think ERC = Safe. Which ofc might not be true if more people follow this path.

Anyway, that's very clever:
"I guess thats why it's called erc-404, like not found since it doesn't really exsist as a erc."