I have come to learn about ape coin recently. But I am not sure how are they restricting people from naming a new cryptop currency with 'Ape Coin'?
Dothey have patents or something?
Why am I asking this question? What if I create a crypto-currency and some steals the unique name of my currency? That will create a confusion among the users. And they may start using stolen coin unknowingly?
Ethereum and most other crypto networks are decentralized, without any authority or mechanism controlling token names.
So it's technically possible to create another Ape Coin, even with the very same functionality.
Some centralized services such as Coinmarketcap might deny listing of these obvious copies of famous coins on their service. And some semi-decentralized services such as Uniswap have a list of verified token addresses and show a warning if you're about to trade a token that is not on this list.
But generally, the network is not stopping two separate authors to both create a token and both name it "XYZ".