A United Kingdom court has given an order to freeze assets worth £6 million ($7.6 million) belonging to Craig Wright. This move was made to ensure that Wright is prevented from evading court expenses from his recent legal battle. Craig Wright was recently embroiled in a lawsuit against the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), claiming that he was the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
United Kingdom court freezes Craig Wright’s assets
The ruling was also made off the back of Wright’s recent transfer of assets outside the United Kingdom after he lost the legal battle. According to a United Kingdom court document, Wright some transferred some shares of his firm in London RCJBR Holding to an entity in Singapore on March 18. The action was enough to question if Wright was trying to evade the consequences of his loss at the trial.
In the document, Judge Hames Mellor noted that COPA raised the alarm, prompting him to endorse the order to freeze all of Craig Wright’s assets worldwide. COPA incurred more than $8 million in court expenses during the trial. Founded in 2020, COPA seeks to promote crypto adoption and innovation while eliminating barriers to growth and innovation in the sector.
It has a membership base that includes crypto heavyweights like Coinbase, Block, MicroStrategy, Uniswap, Paradigm, Worldcoin, and Meta. Craig Wright has leveraged his claims of being the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto to assert copyrights on Bitcoin-related projects.
COPA’s lawsuit and copyright challenges
Some of Craig Wright’s lawsuits included demanding the removal of the Bitcoin white paper from two websites in 2021. In April 2021, COPA dragged him to court, challenging his copyright claims to the ownership of Bitcoin and being Satoshi Nakamoto. Testimonies from early developers in the Bitcoin space were enough for the court to rule that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Last year, Craig Wright filed 13 different lawsuits against several platforms in the crypto space, alleging copyright violations about the Bitcoin white paper. Some of the companies involved in the lawsuit were Coinbase, Blockstream, and Block. In its reaction, the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund highlighted its concerns over the trend of going after key contributors in the Bitcoin space.
Aside from the stress and heavy expenses incurred by the lawsuits, there is also the risk of upsetting the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Although Wright registered the copyright claim to Bitcoin white paper in the United States, it can now be used by anyone who wishes to modify its code. Another injunction against Craig Wright would also stop him from making any copyright claims on the white paper.