Legal Mongrel
Legal Mongrel

Legal Mongrel

Commentary and analysis - legal and other.


FTX: The Aftermath - New Regulations?

28 Nov 2022 6 minute read 1 comment JamesIrving

  In the immediate aftermath of the11 November 2022 filing for bankruptcy by Bahamas-based FTX, at the time one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, there has been a lot of discussion about what will happen next. Some mainstream media co...

SEC v LBRY: Implications for the Blockchain Economy

21 Nov 2022 9 minute read 1 comment JamesIrving

  In a recent judgment (published November 7, 2022), the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire has ruled that the LBC token, which is designed for use on the LBRY blockchain, is a registrable security for the purposes of the...

Blockchain Law: A New Frontier

10 Aug 2020 4 minute read 0 comments JamesIrving

  One common feature of legal systems worldwide is that they tend to evolve. Today many countries have laws that make cyber-hacking a criminal activity, but there were always laws against interfering with other people's property. This is an example...

Tax Investigations & Crypto

26 Jul 2020 5 minute read 0 comments JamesIrving

  What power does the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have to demand information from a crypto exchange? This is the topic of a new lawsuit filed in the US District Court by a user of three exchanges, who has objected to the way the IRS obtained i...

Regulatory Sandboxes - What Are They?

18 Jul 2020 3 minute read 2 comments JamesIrving

  There have been a lot of court cases involving coin promoters, especially in the US. What if there were a way to avoid being "busted" for breaching securities laws and other compliance roadblocks to ICOs and STOs? Some jurisdictions are setting up...

Telegram Settlement: The Implications

29 Jun 2020 4 minute read 2 comments JamesIrving

Telegram Group settles with the SEC Yahoo! Finance and other news outlets report that Telegram Group recently agreed to pay the SEC a penalty of USD$18.5 million: read the Yahoo! story here. Telegram Group was investigated by the SEC and taken to co...

Block.one Litigation: Lessons for Promoters?

22 Jun 2020 5 minute read 1 comment JamesIrving

Block.one, the promoter of the EOS token, is currently facing two class-action lawsuits. There have been a number of lawsuits in the US against promoters of ICOs, security tokens (STOs), and the operators of trading exchanges. Some of these cases ar...

BitMEX Litigation

25 May 2020 8 minute read 1 comment JamesIrving

    The operators of BitMEX have recently become involved in four separate lawsuits in the US. BitMEX is a cryptocurrency futures trading exchange which offers customers an online peer-to-peer trading platform. (I should say at the outset that the p...

Search Engine Lawsuit

15 May 2020 2 minute read 0 comments JamesIrving

  Google recently lost a lawsuit in an Australian court. The Supreme Court of Victoria handed down a decision on 30th April 2020 finding that Google had published a defamatory article about a Melbourne lawyer, Mr George Defteros, by continuing to re...

Ripple Lawsuit Explained

9 May 2020 4 minute read 4 comments JamesIrving

  On May 1, 2020, it was announced that Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement LLC had sued Ripple Labs, Inc. and two other defendants in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. This post reviews the Plaintiff's Complaint document fil...