Bell Yard advises ONTIER, the firm whose client, Dr Wright, authored the Bitcoin White Paper, under the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, creating the blueprint for a new digital asset over 15 years ago.
Having been ‘doxxed’ as Satoshi in 2015, he faced relentless online hostility from individuals and entities with a vested interest in alternative digital coins. Dr Wright soon determined to prove his identity through the courts, establishing and enforcing his copyright in the White Paper and numerous patents relating to the blockchain.
Bell Yard’s role has been to promote ONTIER’s incremental successes in the English legal cases being brought and/or challenged by the firm on Dr Wright’s behalf, so as to marginalise the online abusers and to achieve public recognition, through court judgments, that Dr Wright is indeed who he says he is.
We work in close conjunction with Dr Wright’s personal PR team, while remaining dedicated to our task of promoting the litigation outcomes.
We are currently advising on the communication around a ground-breaking action against 16 bitcoin developers to establish their duty to restore access to stolen/lost private keys to those who can demonstrate, to the satisfaction of a court, their ownership of the wallet in which digital currency is stored. We also support ONTIER in the various copyright infringement cases ongoing, as well as defamation actions in UK and Norway. Running in parallel is a huge case (brought by ONTIER on behalf of an entity beneficially owned by Dr Wright), against digital currency exchanges Kraken and Coindesk, valued in the hundreds of billions of pounds.
Summary
Not only are these various litigations complex, involving multi-parties across multiple jurisdictions, they are also at the cutting edge of digital currency development, with Bitcoin gaining increasing traction towards mainstream acceptance. There can be few litigation PR instructions of such novelty and magnitude and we remain fortunate to be advising such a creative and brilliantly innovative legal team and end client.
Bell Yard’s contact details can be found here.
