Silver Miller and securities law firm Levi & Korsinsky from United States have filed a lawsuit against the developers of altcoin Nano (NANO) as well as Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail, according to a notice published Jan. 7.
Filed on the 3rd of this month by James Fabian individually and on behalf of all other affected investors, the lawsuit names Francesco Firano, Colin Lemahieu, Mica Busch, Zach Shapiro, Troy Retzer, the NANO Project and BitGrail as defendants of the case. It has been filed in the District Court of Northern California.
In a controversial incident, over $180 million in Nano — calculated at the time of the event — went missing from the exchange in February, 2018.
The lawsuit asks the court to order Nano to perform a ‘rescue fork’ of the allegedly lost Nano “into a new cryptocurrency in a manner that would fairly compensate the class of victims.”
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The first lawsuit against NANO due to the BitGrail hack was filed in the Eastern District Court of New York. The plaintiff, Alex Brola, also claimed that the NANO development team induced investors to buy the digital asset ahead of the hack. It also added that the team had carried out an unregistered securities offering. Brola had also requested that the development team issue a recovery fork. However, the case was dismissed by the court in October of last year.
Nano holders shedding some light on the “farcical” lawsuit
One Reddit user and Nano holder expressed his thoughts on the matter:
“In this second case, they shamelessly include some tweets. Like this : https://imgur.com/a/8BcEAsC They also include one of Mica’s gif memes.
I have never seen such silly tweets included as part of litigations. They literally are struggling to put together a case.
Heights of desperation to scam Fabian (whoever that is) with fake promises and lies.
There is no evidence for anything they claim, including proof that Fabian actually bought XRB on shitgrail. Instead they are relying on Bomber’s statement which was debunked by Jay (Nanex) as a load of lies.
They also claim that Nano’s software had bugs (based on Bomber’s statement); they are unaware of Red4Sec’s security audit which can be used to contradict them
- On or about August 16, 2017, Plaintiff Fabian purchased 1.62457112 bitcoin (BTC) on Coinbase’s website (www.coinbase.com) using a credit card. The total purchase price was $7,104.30 with each bitcoin worth $4,308.83
- On August 22, 2017, Plaintiff Fabian transferred his entire 1.62457112 BTC to Bittrex, a cryptocurrency exchange (www.bittrex.com).
- On August 31, 2017, Plaintiff Fabian opened an account on BitGrail and then transferred .66971933 BTC from his Bittrex bitcoin wallet to BitGrail. At the time, the .66971933 BTC had a value of approximately $3,220.
- To open and manage his BitGrail account, Plaintiff logged onto BitGrail’s website from his home and followed the instructions provided.
- On September 1, 2017, the .66971933 BTC became available on BitGrail, and Plaintiff Fabian used that entire sum to purchase approximately 21,143 XRB.
The above imply: Evidently Fabian had purchased the XRB even before the the Bit Grail situation had evolved. At the time he purchased XRB, no one made any kind of statements to him to buy from Bitgrail (not even Zach, whose tweets were dated Dec/Jan). Fabian could have withdrawn the funds at anytime, yet blames his mistake on Nano devs.
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On December 12, 2017, Plaintiff Fabian transferred $2,850.00 to BitGrail to purchase another 2,000 XRB.
BitGrail is not a fiat exchange. He could not have transferred USD to Bit Grail. This is simply another lie.
I want to see Buttcoiners Silver Miller get sued for lying multiple times. These guys shamelessly solicit business through reddit / twitter and try to make a case with obtuse securities act provisions that have no place in crypto. Their Coinbase litigation was even more funny, they actually included reddit posts screenshots and stuff.”
What could this mean for Nano?
If Nano works as intended and marketed, namely a fully decentralized network without central point of failures, the lawsuit won’t have any effect on it. I mean, you can’t really sue a currency, can you?
However, as most of the altcoin project, Nano is heavily dependent on the Nano Foundation and publicly known developers which means that individual suits against them can severely damage the future of Nano coin, with a plausible possibility of a stagnation in its development, should the suits bear unfavorable results for the defendants.
