28.03.2024

Fintech Think Tank Takes Legal Action Against Cardano Foundation

The Switzerland-based group supporting the blockchain and cryptocurrency project confirmed in a blog post Monday that Z/Yen had initiated legal proceedings against it.

A London-based think tank has brought legal action against the Cardano Foundation for allegedly terminating a 2017 agreement.

«It is our obligation to inform the Cardano community of legal proceedings recently initiated by the Z/Yen Group Limited (UK) against the Cardano Foundation (Switzerland),» the foundation said.

The dispute revolves around a reported agreement between the two organizations that the foundation allegedly terminated or voided for reasons that are not disclosed in the blog post.

«The Cardano Foundation fully rejects the claims raised by the Z/Yen Group Limited,» the blog post reads, going on to say that it would not provide any further information while proceedings were underway.

However, the agreement in question appears to be one made in December 2017, when the foundation partnered with Z/Yen’s Distributed Futures practice for collaborating on new research papers, as well as exploring potential applications for Cardano and its ADA cryptocurrency.

At the time, Michael Parsons, the foundation’s then-chairman and executive director, described the Z/Yen partnership as «extremely important.» He said the two organizations would work together on the ongoing development of new tools and functionalities that would help increase industry understanding of governance and regulatory issues.

In February 2018, the Cardano Foundation’s official Twitter account posted about an event run by «our research partner» Z/Yen, for exploring how quantum computing could be used for blockchain security. Later that year, Z/Yen announced plans to experiment with smart ledgers for administering pension schemes, which would be sponsored by the Cardano Foundation according to a press release.

Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of IOHK, a Cardano developer, said the lawsuit is a «commercial dispute» and a «leftover» from the former administration of the foundation. He added that none of Z/Yen’s research had been used in the Cardano protocol.

Z/Yen’s co-founder and executive chairman Michael Mainelli told CoinDesk that neither he or Z/Yen were able to comment on the legal case while it was undergoing judicial consideration.

Established in 1994, Z/Yen is a commercial think tank for research and development into the finance and technology sectors. It launched its Distributed Futures group in 2015.

Fired Employees’ Harassment Suit Against Tron Will Move to Private Arbitration

A court has moved two fired Tron Foundation employees’ claims of wrongful termination and workplace harassment to arbitration.On March 12, the San Francisco Superior Court upheld an arbitration agreement the employees signed when they were hired. The defendants – the Tron Foundation, Tron file-sharing subsidiary BitTorrent, Tron CEO Justin Sun and Tron engineering head Cong Li – filed a motion to compel arbitration on Feb. 19, citing the agreement.

“The arbitration provisions incorporated the applicable rules of the American Arbitration Association”, Judge Ethan Schulman wrote in the order compelling arbitration. “The agreements clearly state each party promises to resolve claims by arbitration.”

In arbitration, the case will be heard privately, without a jury trial that would have aired the blockchain non-profit’s dispute in court.

The judge also justified the order on grounds the agreement was attached to an employment contract as a separate document that was not hidden from the employees. Plaintiffs Richard Hall and Lukasz Juraszek based their arbitration motion’s opposition, filed on Feb. 27, on claims the agreement was presented on a “take it or leave it” basis and that they did not read or understand it.

“Plaintiffs disagree as a matter of law, and we believe the court abused its discretion”, Bill Fitzgerald of Fitzgerald Law Offices, one of two law firms representing Hall and Juraszek, said in an email to CoinDesk.

As of Monday, the lawsuit’s proceedings have been paused until further notice due to a California state shutdown of government buildings spurred by the international coronavirus outbreak. A case management conference scheduled for April was moved to October by a blanket county court order.

Li declined to comment on the arbitration request. Sun and the Tron Foundation’s lawyers at Fisher and Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.

The Tron Foundation’s response to the litigation comes as technology companies do away with mandatory arbitration in harassment and discrimination lawsuits.

Last year, Google ended all employee agreements with mandatory arbitration and waived the clause in future agreements, following the precedent set by Facebook, AirBnB and eBay the year before.

Hall and Juraszek alleged in the lawsuit, initiated in October, that they were racially discriminated and retaliated against for being Caucasian, reporting incidents of physical assault by Sun and Li to human resources, and sounding the alarm on child pornography and copyright-infringing content on BitTorrent file-sharing applications.

Their firings were the last salvo in the retaliation, Hall and Juraszek contended in the lawsuit.

BitTorrent, acquired for $120 million by Sun in July 2018, employed Hall as a senior product manager from December 2018 to June 2019 and Juraszek as a software engineer from February to August 2019.

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