Lawyers Duke it Out Over Who Gets To Lead the Class Action Suit Against Tether

Vying to serve as lead counsel in the emerging class action with potentially tens of thousands of injured members.

IFinex's Tether stablecoin firm and its Bitfinex subsidiary are charged with manipulating the Bitcoin market in 2017 - something the firm strenuously denies.

The case should not be limited to Bitcoin issues alone, he argued; it should include other cryptocurrencies like Ether that may have been harmed by the alleged pump-and-dump scheme.

It investigated whether Tether in?uenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom.

The authors found that that purchases with Tether were timed following market downturns and resulted in "Sizable increases in Bitcoin prices." This paper became a foundational piece of research for all four subsequent lawsuits.

The Griffin paper showed, said Roche, that the price of Bitcoin was going down before Tether's issuance, but after Tether was issued the price of Bitcoin went up - and this happened with six other crypto currencies as well.

"We are class action lawyers, and we are antitrust and commodities lawyers." And, she contended, that even though they weren't the first to file a complaint, their work was the most original, with an extensive regression analysis that identified 115 specific dates when market manipulation occurred and 256 actual transactions.

Their firm's proprietary algorithm would show "a lockstep pricing relationship between spot Bitcoin and Bitcoin futures," she argued.

Who gets to sue Tether?More significant, perhaps, Cochran criticized the class size proposed by the other law firms.

"Roche defined it as anyone who owned crypto over the last six years. That's overwrought - much too broad. Bitcoin and Bitcoin futures are closer to my definition of the class. Not all cryptos should be included." That would simply be taking money from real victims and giving it to others.