Jakov Dolic, co-founder of the U.S.-based Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Layer1, has filed a lawsuit against his former business partner, Alexander Liegl. According to court documents filed on October 30, Dolic claimed that Liegl had ultimately failed to raise funds for the company. As a result, Dolic said that he had to pay $16.24 million out of pocket to purchase a power plant for the mining firm. He also claimed to have spent an additional $3.5 million expanding the plant. Dolic felt short changed for his investment, noting that Layer1 took full legal possession of the assets in question. When …

Virgil Griffith, the former Ethereum Foundation researcher accused of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, filed a motion on Thursday to dismiss the charge against him on the grounds that prosecutors from the Southern District of New York have failed to properly state Griffith’s crime. Griffith, 37, was arrested by FBI agents on Nov. 28th, 2019 following a presentation at a conference in North Korea in April. Prosecutors allege that at the conference Griffith rendered services to the North Korean government in the form of “valuable information” he provided to DPRK officials, and that …

On Wednesday, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission announced the end of its lawsuit against Kik Interactive. The Canadian messenger app fell afoul of the U.S. regulator for failing to treat its sale of KIN tokens as a securities offering. A district judge confirmed the SEC’s view at the end of September, but only today did the court see the final judgment. As a result of today’s judgment, Kik will need to pay the SEC $5 million in penalties and keep the commission posted as to any capital raises for the next three years. Given that Kik was a …

The NAC Foundation has accused the United States Securities and Exchange Commission of misconduct in an ongoing case. According to court documents Oct. 20, Rowland Marcus Andrade and his company NAC Foundation asked a San Francisco federal judge to dismiss the SEC’s June lawsuit alleging that he and his associate Jack Abramoff defrauded investors in a $5.6 million token offering. Andrade argued that the SEC “purposefully attempted to mislead the court” by accusing him of offering a technology that had never been developed. According to the defendant, the SEC was aware that he held patents for Anti-Money Laundering technology related …

The trustee of the now-defunct Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox has obtained another approval to extend the deadline for submitting a rehabilitation plan. Following a motion by Mt. Gox rehabilitation trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi, the Tokyo District Court issued another order to extend the deadline until Dec. 15, 2020, according to an official announcement posted on the Mt. Gox website on Oct. 15. Similarly to previous statements on deadline extensions, the new announcement specifies that the rehabilitation trustee is still formulating the plan, but “there are matters that require closer examination,” so it “has become necessary to extend the submission deadline.” …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note In a tweet late last night, President Trump said that he and Melania had tested positive for COVID-19. If you weren’t already aware of that, you may want to catch up on a deluge of wishes for life and death, alongside speculation as to Trump’s announcement being a hoax, before sitting down to this week’s Law Decoded. Or possibly not. Every week leading up to the presidential election features more amplified headlines. Law Decoded is likely not the ideal …

The legal representatives of technology company Nvidia have argued that its investors are not entitled to access its internal records about the “crypto craze” of 2017 and 2018. During a trial in the United States' Delaware Court of Chancery on Sept. 17, Nvidia's counsel argued that the plaintiffs have failed to show a “credible basis” for why Nvidia should be compelled to hand over the requested company documents. Nvidia is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that it misled investors as to how much its revenue relied on crypto miners buying its graphics processing units amid the 2017 bull run. Patrick …

A major suspect in a high-profile theft case related to Bitcoin (BTC) trading has pleaded guilty in a Singaporean court. Syed Mokhtar Syed Yusope, an accomplice in a $360,000 robbery, pleaded guilty in a district court to a robbery charge on Sept. 9, Singeporean news agency The Straits Times reports. Mokhtar, alongside his two accomplices, Jaromel Gee Ming Li and Mohd Abdul Rahman Mohamad, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from a Malaysian man in Singapore. Pretending to represent a Bitcoin broker, the group duped the victim into believing that they wanted to sell him Bitcoin for cash. …

In a Sept. 4 filing in Fornite creator Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Google, the gaming firm has accused the omnipresent tech giant of violating its founding “don’t be evil” dictum and actively uses its market power to overcharge app developers. The core issue of the current case is that, earlier in August, Epic Games announced direct payments on mobile versions of Fortnite on Android and iOS. The payments would give customers a 20% discount on the app’s native V-Bucks — by circumventing the 30% fees that both Apple and Google charge for those payments. The next day, both Apple …

In the final decision on a criminal case that began a decade ago, an appellate court has said that the National Security Agency’s phone data collection practices were in fact illegal. They did, however, uphold the convictions in the case. According to the 9th Circuit Court’s Sept. 2 opinion in USA v. Moalin: We conclude that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans. The court continued to attack the program, writing that the government’s case neglects that “the collection of …

The three-year-long class action lawsuit targeting Tezos (XTZ) has come to a conclusion after Judge Seeborg approved Tezos’ $25 million settlement on Friday. According to the judgment, the funds will be distributed among “all persons and entities” who participated in Tezos’ 2017 initial coin offering from July 1 to 13 and sold their XTZ for a loss before Nov. 25, 2019, did not sell their tokens before Nov. 25, or are unable to access their XTZ due to lost passwords. Eligible parties must file a claim to receive a share in the settlement before Oct. 16, 2020. The plaintiffs’ counsel …

In the case of United Kingdom-based Control-Finance and its AWOL operator Benjamin Reynolds, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked the court to order Reynolds pay nearly half a billion dollars on Aug. 20. In a legal action that began in June of last year, the CFTC has been unsuccessful in its attempts to locate Reynolds. The commission alleges that Reynolds laundered 22,858 Bitcoin from May to October of 2017 — by their estimates worth $147 million at the time, but as of press time valued at $269 million. The CFTC’s proposed judgment asks for $429 — nearly three …