Crackdown On ICO: 11 Lawsuits Filed Against Crypto Firms

A crackdown on ICO cryptocurrency has been unleashed upon various digital asset companies and exchanges. Roche Cyrulnik Freedman filed lawsuits for three plaintiffs in the Southern District of New York and all of them claim that platforms such as Bibox, Tron, Binance, Bitmex, and Block.one sold unregistered securities to retail investors. Let’s find out more about it in the ICO cryptocurrency news.

The law firm Roche Cyrulnik Freedman has filled its hands with work as the attorneys have multiple high profile lawsuits for companies in the crypto industry. The publication Bloomberg Law called the law firm as ‘’litigation boutique’’ that specializes in crypto cases. The law firm was involved in the trillion-dollar lawsuit against Tether Limited and the Kleiman v. Wright court case. The case against proclaimed bitcoin creator Craig Wright exceeded $5.1 billion USD worth of Bitcoin before the punitive damages.

The class-action lawsuit filings were started by the defendants Eric Lee, Chase Williams, and Alexander Clifford. The filings were found by offshore news Offshore alert which considers itself as an offshore financial center expert. Crypto platforms that were sued include Quantstamp, KuCoin, BitMEX, Bprotocol, Block.one, Status and Binance. The developers such as Dan Larimer, Vinny Lingham, Arthur Hayes, and Changpeng Zhao, are all mentioned in each court filing. The lawsuits mentioned the allegation of unlicensed activity and the sale of unregistered securities through ICO cryptocurrency offerings or IEOs.

The plaintiff Chase Williams’ lawsuit against Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao, says that Binance sold unregistered securities as digital tokens including BNT, EOS, TRX, FUN, LEND, CVC, QSP, SNT. All of the lawsuits were filled with the Southern District of New York at the start of the month. The 42 defendants named in the lawsuits involve individuals from South Africa, Taiwan, China, US, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands. The plaintiffs and the law firm will have a hard time with the crackdown on ICO because of the jurisdictions. There’s also not a single government standard or conclusion towards the unregistered securities. The accusation against the Tron Foundation noted:

‘’The creation of TRX tokens thus occurred through a centralized process, in contrast to Bitcoin and Ethereum. This, however, would not have been apparent at issuance to a reasonable investor. Rather, it was only after the passage of time and disclosure of additional information about the issuer’s intent, the process of management, and success in allowing decentralization to arise that a reasonable purchaser could know that he or she had acquired security. Purchasers were thereby misled into believing that TRX was something other than a security when it was a security.’’