This week, a nearly £10 billion ($12.19 billion) class action lawsuit was filed in the United Kingdom against Binance, Kraken, Bittylicious, and Shapeshift over collectively delisting BSV in 2019. The lawsuit was filed by BSV Claims Limited on behalf of the U.K. consumers who held the digital asset.
The claims are brought in for Collective Proceedings Order (CPO) in the U.K.’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), a judicial body that has the power to resolve competition law disputes. A CPO is like a class action lawsuit in the United States.
The companies were accused of publicly colluding to damage the growth and potential of BSV, causing losses to holders and investors. The claim states, “the delisting arose from personal animosity from the individuals in charge of these exchanges towards a high-profile proponent of BSV.” It also states that “the effect of this conduct was to harm competition by artificially driving down the value of BSV, causing loss to holders of and investors in the coin.” Binance and Kraken allegedly seized some users’ BSV after the delisting.
According to BSV Claims’ Director and class representative Lord David Currie of Marylebone, “The case is an opportunity to demonstrate that competition law applies in the sphere of crypto assets in the same way that it does to other economic activities.” He believes “that the class members deserve to be protected from anti-competitive behavior.” He added, “the fact that the delisting activity described… was concerted and has gone unchallenged by regulators raises, to my mind, serious consumer protection issues.” Lord Currie was the inaugural chair of the U.K. Regulator Competition and Markets Authority.
As of this writing, he said digital currency exchanges have yet to comment on the lawsuit.
Still in the U.K., the High Court has found podcaster Peter McCormack guilty of defamation in 15 counts against Dr. Craig Wright. The U.K. judge also agreed that the said tweets had caused serious harm to Dr. Wright’s reputation in the United Kingdom.
Following the doxing of Wright as the creator of Bitcoin in 2015, he has faced constant harassment in public in which McCormack played a pivotal role. Wright sued McCormack over a series of defamatory tweets in 2019. This came after one of the podcaster’s tweets, “When do I get sued?” The judge ordered McCormack to pay a nominal amount of £1 ($1.22) in damages to Dr. Wright, on top of the more than £100,000 ($121,810) worth of costs already paid.
More attacks in the digital assets space were witnessed this week.
Solana users lost about $5 million after a global attack drained thousands of hot wallets. Hours after the incident, the Solana Network engineers have not defined the root cause of the hack. Solana advised users to abandon compromised wallets and encouraged them to try hardware wallets instead.
The attack comes after Nomad’s exploit early this week, resulting in a loss of almost $200 million worth of wrapped ETH and BTC. Nomad is a software bridge between Ethereum, Avalanche, and other networks—allowing assets to move from one blockchain to another.
In other news, Bitcoin websites are moving to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Some, such as CoinGeek and Bitcoin Association, have started jumping into the next version of the internet protocol.
Bitcoin can realize its full potential with IPv6, which makes it possible for direct, secure, and fast transactions between hundreds of billions of users and devices worldwide—creating a massive and new digital economy.
To learn more about IPv6 and how it works with the BSV blockchain, check out this interview of Jon Southurst with Dr. Craig Wright. Watch the full video on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.
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New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
