Jack Dorsey Plans To Help Bitcoin Developers Fight Lawsuits By Establishing Defense Fund | Currency News | Financial and business news

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Jack Dorsey on stage at a Bitcoin convention on June 4, 2021 in Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Block CEO Jack Dorsey and others are considering setting up a legal fund to help bitcoin developers, he said Wednesday. It will first help 16 developers facing a multibillion-dollar lawsuit to gain access to Bitcoin wallets. Dorsey has focused on crypto since leaving as CEO of Twitter and warned that VCs threatened to dominate Web3.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed plans to create a fund to help bitcoin developers, which he says are hampered by lawsuits on multiple fronts.

The non-profit Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund will help developers defend themselves against lawsuits related to their activity in the bitcoin ecosystem, Dorsey and other members of the fund’s board said in an email Tuesday. .

“The bitcoin community is currently the subject of litigation on multiple fronts,” they said in the message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list.

“Continued prosecutions and threats are having the intended effect; the individual defendants chose to surrender in the absence of legal backing. ”

The fund will select cases to help them pay their legal bills, work on strategy and hire defense attorneys, according to the email.

Its first move is to support 16 developers pursued by Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claims to be the creator of bitcoin. Wright won a court battle in December to keep a cache of 1.1 million bitcoins, worth around $ 54 billion at the time.

In the new case, known as the “Tulip Trading” lawsuit, Wright claims that the access keys to a bitcoin wallet were stolen from him last year in the Mt. Gox hack, and he demands that developers are forced to give him back control of the wallet. Billions of dollars are at stake again.

Dorsey has focused more on crypto since stepping down as CEO of Twitter to focus on digital finance company Block, which has changed its name from Square. Two NBA stars have agreed to have their salaries paid in bitcoin through his Cash app, the latest in Dorsey’s efforts to expand bitcoin adoption.

Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, has been challenged by the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance. COPA was created by Square in 2020 to “help the crypto community defend itself against patent attackers and trolls,” Dorsey said.

COPA said it prevailed in the first court hearing in the Wright case late last year.

Dorsey was recently embroiled in a digital debate over whether venture capitalists own too many Web3s. Marc Andreessen, whose a16z is active in crypto funding, then blocked Dorsey on Twitter.

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