LONDON Reuters - Self-proclaimed bitcoin creator Craig Wright's lawsuit against developers of the Bitcoins can be brought to trial on Friday, a London court said on Friday.
A lawyer representing some developers said that if Wright wins, the ruling will lead to a trial on whether developers owe duties to the owners of digital assets.
Australian computer scientist Wright is suing 15 developers in an effort to retrieve around 111,000 bitcoins, currently worth $2.5 billion, after he lost the encrypted keys to access them when his home network was hacked.
Wright's Seychelles-based company Tulip Trading is taking legal action against the developers of three networks, arguing that they are obliged to write software patches to help Tulip recover the bitcoins.
Tulip's case was thrown out last year, but the Court of Appeal ruled on Friday that developers arguably do owe duties to owners, which should be determined at a full trial.
Judge Colin Birss said Tulip has a realistic argument that cryptocurrencies are entrusted to network developers, who would therefore have a duty to introduce code so that an owner's bitcoins can be transferred to safety. Wright writes the 2008 bitcoins white paper which first outlined the technology behind the digital assets under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, but the claim is hotly disputed.
He said he was delighted with the ruling.
His lawyer, Felicity Potter, said the decision was a step towards a properly regulated digital asset ecosystem that should be welcomed by potential and current coinholders, including James Ramsden, a lawyer who represented 13 of the 14 developers involved in the appeal. He said that code writers are incredibly nervous about the case, which could leave them liable for huge sums of money if Wright wins.
He said that the outcome of the trial will affect all aspects of decentralised finance, whether it involves value tokens or NFTs non-fungible token or the wider blockchain system.