A British judge freezes $7.6 million worth of assets of computer scientist Crag Wright after determining he was not Satoshi, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin (BTC).
New court documents reveal that the judge has ordered a global freeze on more than £6 million of Wright’s assets to prevent him from avoiding legal costs.
According to the judge, Wright can move his assets to Singapore to avoid legal costs. As the judge states in the court documents,
“On Monday, March 18, Dr. Wright filed a form with Companies House in respect of his company RCJBR Holding PLC, by which form he notified Companies House that his shares in RCJBR had been transferred to DeMorgan PTE, a company incorporated under the laws of Singapore.
Understandably, this raised serious concerns at COPA (Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance) that Dr. Wright implemented measures to avoid the cost implications of his loss at trial.
In addition, the judge points to past cases in which Wright has failed to make the payments he was ordered to make, including a judgment debt of $140 million in the US and almost $400,000 in Norway.
Earlier this month, Wright was sued by COPA, a nonprofit crypto advocacy group, for claiming to be the pseudonymous creator of BTC. At the time, the judge ruled that there was “overwhelming evidence” that Wright was not, in fact, Satoshi, nor the author of the BTC White Paper, Bitcoin’s original thesis, written in 2008.
After winning in court, COPA released a statement saying:
“This decision is a victory for developers, for the entire open source community and for the truth. For more than eight years, Dr. Wright and his backers lied about his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto and used that lie to bully and intimidate developers in the Bitcoin community.
That ends today with the court ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.”
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Featured image: Shutterstock/robertedit949/Natalia Siiatovskaia