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Binance Asks UK Competition Tribunal to Throw Out Most of Collusion Case: Reuters

The case relates to the delisting of the BSV token in 2019.

Updated Jun 7, 2024, 3:46 p.m. Published Jun 5, 2024, 4:15 p.m.
16:9 UK London (Artur Tumasjan / Unsplash)
16:9 UK London (Artur Tumasjan / Unsplash)
  • Binance lawyers asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal to remove claims BSV could have become a major cryptocurrency had it not been delisted.
  • Holders of the token missed out on a potential $9 billion of gains, according to litigant BSV Claims.

Binance asked the U.K.'s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to throw out most of a collusion case against it and three other crypto exchanges brought by BSV Claims in a suit that could be worth as much as 10 billion British pounds ($13 billion), Reuters reported.

The exchanges delisted the token in 2019, in what BSV Claims argues was collusion in anticompetitive behavior. As a result token holders missed out on potential gains of more than 9 billion pounds, the firm said. It calculated the loss by looking at gains made by other cryptocurrencies since then, BitMEX Research said.

Binance asked the tribunal to remove claims BSV could have become a major cryptocurrency. Binance laywer Brian Kennelly said BSV holders "could reasonably have sold it and reinvested it in comparable cryptocurrency", according to Reuters.

The case is being brought on behalf of an estimated 240,000 U.K. investors, BSV Claims said when it was established in 2022. The company's sole director is David Currie, a former chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority and a member of the House of Lords, according to records at Companies House.

Other defendants in the case are Bittylicious, Kraken and Shapeshift.

A key backer of BSV is Craig Wright, who last month was ruled to have lied "extensively and repeatedly" in a London court examining his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin.

The case is 1523/7/7/22 and is scheduled to end on June 7.

CORRECTION (June 7, 15:46 UTC): Corrects spelling of David Currie's surname, and his position as chairman. An earlier version of the story said he was chairman of the CAT.


Sheldon Reback

Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk's European news editor. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He subsequently managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page before becoming the European editor for a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. His previous work as a journalist took him to Hong Kong, where he reported and edited for several technology magazines, and he also has experience in market research and writing computer manuals. Sheldon has an MBA from the London Business School and an industrial chemistry degree from Brunel University. He owns a small amount of ether.

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