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Micree Zhan Ketuan, the co-founder of the crypto mining giant Bitmain, has launched a court proceeding against the shareholders of the company in a bid to restore his voting control in the company as we are reading further in the latest crypto news.

As per the reports, Micree Zhan asked the Cayman Islands court to discredit Bitmain’s shareholders’ decision to convert Bitmain’s class B shares to a single vote per share while previously a Class B share came with ten votes. The shareholders reduced Zhan’s influence this way. According to the initial public offering in 2018, Zhan owned about 4 million Class B shares which is twice as much as Wu who is the other holder of the special stock.

The conflicts between Zhan and the other shareholders started in October 2019 when the company’s co-founder Jihan Wu announced that Zhan had left Bitmain and even warned the employees. The email read:

 “Bitmain’s co-founder, chairman, legal representative and executive director Jihan Wu has decided to dismiss all roles of Ketuan Zhan, effective immediately. Any Bitmain staff shall no longer take any direction from Zhan, or participate in any meeting organized by Zhan. Bitmain may, based on the situation, consider terminating employment contracts of those who violate this note.”

Zhan reacted to the announcement saying the was removed as the legal representative of the company without his consent and he wrote:

 “I didn’t realize until then that those scenes in TV shows, where you get stabbed on your back by those partners you trusted and ‘brothers’ you fought together with, can really happen in real life. […] Bitmain is our child. I will fight for her till the end with legal weapons. I won’t allow those who want to plot against Bitmain to succeed. If someone wants a war, we will give them one.”

As we reported earlier, Bitmain has plans to reduce the workforce by 50 percent as a part of the ‘’personnel optimization plan’’ and the people who are familiar with the matter believe that the real reason for the layoffs is the upcoming Bitcoin halving. With the bitcoin halving, the number of new coins awarded to miners will be cut in half. The Chinese court froze about $676,000 in assets that belonged to bitmain’s subsidiary- the Shenzhen Century Cloud Core. The ruling comes after an application submitted by a manufacturer of the electronic components- Dongguan Yongjiang electronics.