According to an English court document, Craig Wright’s Tulip Trading must demonstrate that it is the rightful owner of the approximately 110,000 bitcoins (BTC) that are at issue in a 2021 lawsuit brought against a consortium of bitcoin developers.
The developers, in that scenario, are contesting Tulip’s lawsuit on the grounds that they improperly declined to assist Wright’s company in recovering billions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin that it purportedly lost in a hack. According to an order from the High Court of England and Wales that was posted on the website of the Bitcoin Legal Defence Fund, the court will be determining in a preliminary trial whether Tulip actually owns the bitcoin. The order is November 15th dated.
Wright sued the developers for refusing to create a backdoor mechanism that would have allowed Tulip Trading to recover the coins it claimed to have lost. Wright has long maintained that he is the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim that has been widely disputed. On appeal, the case that had been dismissed in March 2022 was brought back.
The 15-day preliminary trial will address a number of issues, including whether the purported hack actually happened and, if it did, whether Tulip Trading lost the private keys that controlled the bitcoin.
The founder of Twitter (now X), Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, and Block (formerly Square) are among the investors in the Bitcoin Legal Defence Fund.