On April 3, a massive deployment of lawsuits were filed against major crypto industry players across the globe. The eleven lawsuits were filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in what is being called “Bloody Friday” for the industry. These lawsuits are class action in nature. For those unfamiliar with the term, this means a group of people have joined together to file a lawsuit against another party. Class action lawsuits are not very popular on an international level for a number of reasons, the most prominent being that most of the time …

A group of researchers has devised a blockchain-based mechanism to perform legal functions in a so-called “digital court,” according to an April 6 announcement. Professors Hitoshi Matsushima from the University of Tokyo, and Shunya Noda from the University of British Columbia, have been leading the project, which aims to settle legal disputes without the need for a “costly legal process.” In the announcement, the University of Tokyo clarified that this would be an extension of existing ideas for smart contracts without a centralized administration. A digital court’s advantages and challenges The University says that the benefit of the system is …

Q3 Investment Recovery Vehicle (Q3IRV), an entity representing the more than 100 victims of the alleged $35 million Q3 Ponzi scheme, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Wells Fargo Advisors. The suit accuses Wells Fargo of failing to inquire into the activities of an employee accused of co-masterminding the scam. The plaintiffs assert that the Wells Fargo subsidiary failed to make appropriate inquiries into its financial advisor James Seijas — as per the firm’s policy mandating employees to regularly report activities relating to outside interests. Crypto Ponzi victims sue Wells Fargo for vicarious liability Q3IRV is seeking damages and interest …

The Blockchain Association, a major United States-based trade association in the crypto sphere, has filed a new brief in support of Telegram amid the firm’s continuing legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC). The amicus brief and the SEC’s lack of clarity The April 3 brief takes the SEC to task for backtracking on its own guidance for legally distributing digital assets. Referring to the inconsistency that issuers of digital assets must cope with when dealing with the SEC, the brief says that “No settled precedent or agency rulemaking addressed whether and when digital assets amounted to securities.” …

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has opposed Telegram’s request for clarity regarding the geographic scope of a court injunction barring the company from distributing its Gram (GRAM) tokens. In a letter to Judge Castel dated March 30, the SEC asserts that the injunction “unambiguously, and properly, applies to Telegram’s delivery of Grams to ‘any person or entity’ [...] and requires no clarification.” The Gram tokens correspond to the firm’s $1.7 billion initial coin offering that raised money to launch the Telegram Open Network — or TON — in 2018. SEC claims injunction unambiguously applies to “any person or …

The trustee of now-defunct Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox has extended the deadline for the submission of rehabilitation plans. According to an official announcement published on the company’s website on March 30, Mt. Gox Rehabilitation Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi filed a motion with the Tokyo District Court to extend the submission deadline of a rehabilitation plan. On March 27, the court released an order to extend the deadline to July 1, 2020. Kobayashi was granted a similar extension in April 2019, which pushed the deadline at that time to October. Deadline moved due to ‘matters that require closer examination’ Once a …

The upcoming trial of two men accused of running the fraudulent Centra Tech initial coin offering (ICO), which raised $60 million after soliciting celebrity endorsements in 2018, has been postponed until September 2020. On March 26, a U.S. district court published documents indicating that the trial of alleged Centra Tech operators, Sohrab Sharma and Robert Farkas, will be pushed from April 27 to Sep. 3 amid COVID-19 concerns. The documents were uploaded after a court teleconference on the same day. District judge prepares additional backup plans Noting concerns that other reschedulings may result in further delays to the trial, U.S. …

Following a series of platform outages during historic price action earlier this month, Robinhood, a popular stock and cryptocurrency trading app, now faces another class action complaint. The lawsuit, filed March 25, was brought by customer Bruce Queen, on behalf of “all Robinhood customers within the United States who were not able to execute trades on securities or change limit orders during the Outages and incurred financial losses.” Missing the biggest gain in Dow history As Cointelegraph reported, on March 2, the Robinhood suffered technical problems for the entire day, meaning customers were unable to trade the securities in their …

There is new movement in a class-action lawsuit originally filed in May 2018, centered around allegations that Ripple violated the Securities Act through a 2013 initial coin offering (ICO) of the XRP token. On March 25, an amended complaint accuses Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse of touting the token to prospective investors while silently liquidating his holdings. Garlinghouse accused of liquidating 67 million XRP in 2017 The amended complaint also emphasizes that Garlinghouse represented himself as “very, very, very long” and “on the HODL side” with regard to XRP during 2017, suggesting that the Ripple CEO was holding his XRP for …

Developers of the TON blockchain are still considering deployment, despite injunctive ruling by the U.S. court. Fedor Skuratov, a spokesperson for TON Community Foundation, a community of TON developers, told Cointelegraph that the recent unfavorable decisions by the U.S. court did not catch them by surprise: “The community was ready for this (or another) scenario. We have several options, including the launch of TON by TCF [TON Community Foundation]. I will say more, no one (no one) can prevent the launch of TON by any other entity, person or community, cause TON is a decentralized open-source solution. Already, there are …

Janet Jackson’s billionaire ex husband, Wissam Al Mana, has demanded that Facebook reveal who was behind ads on the platform that used his image to promote a crypto scam. The case stems from late February when Al Mana filed a lawsuit against the social media giant about a cryptocurrency scam using his name to promote itself in the Middle East. Al Mana claimed defamation, malicious falsehood and false advertising from the purported cryptocurrency firm ‘Bitcoin Trader’. One man to sue them all Facebook has since deleted the offending ads, but Al Mana is concerned fraudsters can publish similar ads containing …

Telegram is seeking to appeal a United States federal court’s recent ruling in favor of the Securities and Exchange Commission to halt distribution of GRAM tokens. Rejection of the injunction and the status of the investment contracts In response to the court’s preliminary injunction earlier the same day freezing GRAM issuance until at least the trial, Telegram filed a brief notice of appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The injunction itself tentatively agrees with the SEC’s argument that the contracts governing GRAM issuance — though critically, not necessarily GRAM tokens themselves — seem to qualify as …