Crypto Lawyers Fight Over Who Gets To Lead Tether’s Lawsuit

The crypto lawyers started a fight over who gets to lead the class action lawsuit regarding Tether since in the US courthouse for the Southern District of New York, Judge Katherine Failla talked to three plaintiffs teams that sue iFinex and all claim to be the lead counsel in the class-action lawsuit as we are reading in the tether news.

iFinex’s Tether stablecoin company and the Bitfinex subsidiary are charged with manipulating the Bitcoin market in 2017 which is something that the company denies from the start. Kyle Roche who is representing the plaintiffs Leibowitz argued that his company Roche Cyrulnik Freedman LLP was the first one that was investigating the market manipulation that tether did and was the first one to file a complaint. Roche said:

 “Cryptocurrency is unique, the law is new, and this case presents difficult definitional issues.”

The crypto lawyers continued argued that this case should not be limited to Bitcoin issues alone and that they should include other cryptocurrencies such as Ether that were harmed by the alleged pump and dump scheme. Roche said:

 “Cryptocurrency really works as one market. People who purchase one cryptocurrency often buy many, especially in a bubble.’’

The paper by John M. Griffin and Amin Shams shows that Tether influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during 2017’s boom and the authors even found that the purchases with Tether were timed after the market downturns and resulted in sizable increases in the Bitcoin price. The paper later became the foundational piece of research for the subsequent lawsuits. Many were skeptical in the crypto community that Tether is backed by USD while the paper found that there are insufficient Tether reserves before month-ends.

Karen Lerner of Kirby Mcinerney LLP that represents the plaintiffs’ Young, Kurtz, and Crystal, argued that the different kind of experience was more important in this case:

 “We are class action lawyers, and we are antitrust and commodities lawyers.”

She continued that there were not the first to file a complaint but that they work was the most original with a huge regression analysis that identified 115 specific dates when the market manipulation occurred and 256 actual transactions. The algorithm of the platform would show a lockstep pricing relationship between Bitcoin and BTC futures.