Lawsuit links Bitmain, Roger Ver group to ‘premeditated hostile takeover’ of Bitcoin Cash network

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Bitmain, its co-founder Jihan Wu, along with his “team of conspirators” including Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver, ABC lead developer Amaury Sechet, Kraken and its CEO, Jesse Powell, will have a lot to answer for. On Thursday, a lawsuit was filed before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida accusing the group of fraud and market manipulation, asserting that these people worked “with the knowledge and support of the Chinese government to stage a premeditated hostile takeover” of the Bitcoin Cash BCH network.

Florida-based blockchain company United American Corp. (UAC) is seeking an emergency injunctive relief, citing losses that stemmed from the Bitcoin Cash hard fork last November 15. On that day, a hash war was fought with miners voting between two competing implementations of the BCH protocol—Bitcoin SV and ABC. ABC took a temporary early lead due to an artificial burst from “rented” hash power subsidized by Ver’s Bitcoin.com, and some exchanges—Kraken in particular—prematurely listed the ABC token as Bitcoin Cash BCH.

Now the other shoe has dropped.

Who are the defendants?

Lawyer Brian Miller of Akerman law firm, who heads the team of lawyers that handles the UAC litigation, said there was “a scheme by a tight network of individuals and organizations designed to co-opt the cryptocurrency market for Bitcoin Cash, effectively hijacking the Bitcoin Cash network, centralizing the market and violating all accepted distributed and decentralized standards and protocols associated with Bitcoin since its inception.” The scheme, allegedly spearheaded by Bitmain and Ver’s camp, reportedly caused “a global capitalization meltdown of more than $4 billion and caused many American and Canadian coin holders to suffer financial damages.”

Also named in the UAC lawsuit were ABC developers Shammah Chancellor and Jason B. Cox.

Read the court filings from the BCH Manipulation lawsuit

Aside from the awarding of restitution and compensatory damages, the lawsuit also seeks to prevent ABC from continuing to implement checkpoints on the Bitcoin Cash network and other software implementations that will “prevent the resulting chains from being able to be re-merged. UAC also wants the court to require ABC “to return the blockchain to its previously decentralized form with the previous consensus rules.”

More importantly, UAC wants to prove that the ABC camp, which has “some of the biggest U.S.-based and international names and entities in the digital currency world” among its ranks, is being backed by the Chinese government, all in an effort “to centralize the Bitcoin Cash network resulting in Chinese entities now having established dominance over this important segment of the cryptocurrency market with proprietary software checkpoints and instituting other means of control over the system.”

Lawry Trevor-Deutsch, VP of Corporate Affairs for UAC, said, “We envision a future led by an open, democratic and collaborative community fostering innovation and freedom. No entity or group of entities should seek to seize control of this platform for their own narrow interests or create rules that inhibit new competition and future technological innovation. That’s what this lawsuit is about.”

Full filing can be found here.