On April 11, Wright dropped the appeal of a trial in Norway against crypto influencer Magnus Granath, known under the pseudonym Hodlonaut, who in 2019 described Wright as a “pathetic scammer” in an article on X. ( A parallel claim was dropped in the United Kingdom.) A few days later, Wright killed another lawsuit in which his company, Tulip Trading, accused Bitcoin developers of violating their fiduciary duties by refusing to help the company recover a large amount of Bitcoin that would have been lost. in a hack.
Three other lawsuits – in which Wright accuses Bitcoin developers, as well as crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken, of violating his intellectual property rights in Bitcoin – will be bound by COPA’s decision. These cases remain in place, at least temporarily, pending a possible appeal from Wright.
“We have seen a cascading effect of this declaration on a multitude of other disputes globally,” says Grewal. “For people outside of crypto, [all this] this may seem caricatured. But with Wright’s claims abandoned, the community may expire. We think this is a real victory.
The decision also had implications for Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, or BSV, a separate cryptocurrency network created by Wright in 2018. The idea of BSV is to adapt “as closely as possible to the original Satoshi design” , as the website describes. In the days following the judge’s ruling that Wright was not Satoshi, the price of the BSV token fell 40%.
“We will always value the contributions of Dr. Craig Wright as a leading expert in blockchain technology,” says Cyrille A. Albrecht, CEO of the BSV Association. “However, our goal is, and always has been, to promote and support the evolution of the BSV blockchain at the enterprise level.”
By declaring that Wright is not Satoshi, the judgment will prevent him from taking further action in the UK. It was designed, Mellor writes, to ensure that Wright would have “no possible basis on which to threaten.” [developers] with copyright or database rights arising from the work done by Satoshi Nakamoto. The judge will also decide at a later hearing whether to impose specific injunctions on Wright.
However, the geographic scope of the judgment is limited, leaving Wright open to continuing to assert his intellectual property rights to Bitcoin in other jurisdictions.
