Tezos legal settlement is now final: this closes the road for any further attempts. Great news for Tezos.

Tezos legal settlement is now final: this closes the road for any further attempts. Great news for Tezos.

By Allen Walters | Publish0x posts | 1 Sep 2020


Soon after the ending of the Tezos ICO, a group of opportunists started a lawsuit against the Tezos Foundation, claiming this was an unlicensed security offering. After 3 years of legal battle, a settlement has been reached, which is now signed by the court. This ends all current and future legal dispute on this topic.
The group of lawyers that started this class-action lawsuit, are suspected to have bought into the ICO premeditadedly with the intention to make money from a class-action lawsuit. They lured ICO investors into the class-action lawsuit under the pretense of protecting these people from high risk losses. "Fun" fact: it would have been more profitable to hold XTZ and earn stakingrewards, than to have prematurely sold at a loss and claim a part of the settlement. ICO price was around $0.46, while today's price is around $3.35. You can add around 15% cumulative stakingrewards to that profit. People that have joined the lawsuit, have been abused by the winners of the game: the lawyers, who have netted $8,333,333.33 in attorney's fees.

One could argue, many ICO's were in fact unlicensed security offerings including Ethereum in it's early stages. Ethereum has dodged the bullet, since it has now reached a status of high decentralization, which exempts it from a security classification. (Same would go for Tezos at this point, but since the lawsuit was initiated at the early stages of the project it had to end in this settlement.)
Security classification is a possible judgement which brings legal risk for any of these projects until legally proven differently. In this case Tezos has reached a settlement with the counterparty, which is now final. This settlement closes any opportunity for others to start any legal action based on the presumption that the Tezos ICO was an unlicensed security offering. This is very good news, since this eliminates a specific future risk.

The settlement is not an admission of guilt. As a matter of fact, part of this settlement is the firm denial of The Tezos Founadtion that the ICO was an unlicensed Security Offering. But if the lawsuit would have continued, this would have dragged on for years, costing more in legal fees than this eventual settlement. Adding to that, continuing years of legal battle would have damaged the image of the project even more and would have diverted attention and energy from constructive efforts. Long story short: the US legal system has granted some ambulance chasing lawyers the opportunity to extort money without even getting into the details of the case.

Onward and upwards for Tezos from here. All focus will now be on the continuation of the project. For a current status update, read this article. 

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Allen Walters
Allen Walters

Fascinated by blockchain and future proofing cryptocurrency. Discover the tech before it gets relevant. Twitter: @IgnoranceIt


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