tl;dr
The UK Court of Appeals dismissed a £9 billion lawsuit by BSV Claims Ltd against Binance and other exchanges over the 2019 delisting of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). The claimants, representing around 243,000 BSV holders, alleged coordinated delisting violated competition law and harmed BSV’s value....
The UK Court of Appeals has dismissed BSV Claims Ltd.'s £9 billion lawsuit against Binance and other exchanges concerning the 2019 delisting of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). The claimants, representing approximately 243,000 BSV holders, alleged that coordinated delisting actions by Binance, Kraken, ShapeShift, and others violated competition law and damaged BSV’s value.
The court upheld the “market mitigation rule,” asserting that investors had access to alternative cryptocurrencies and should have mitigated their losses by trading other digital assets. It ruled that no trial was necessary to prove that viable alternatives were available to affected investors. The decision emphasized that claimants “cannot seek hundreds of times more than the value of the assets that the defendants had allegedly damaged.”
Importantly, speculative damages based on the assumption that BSV could have evolved into a top-tier cryptocurrency like Bitcoin were rejected as legally unsupported and implausible. The damages theory, which relied on a 352x increase from BSV’s pre-delisting price, was ruled as lacking both legal precedent and a realistic foundation.
Although a subgroup of about 75,000 investors pursuing “foregone growth” claims was affected by this ruling, the lawsuit continues for other investor groups. These include individuals who sold BSV soon after the delisting or lost access on exchanges like Kraken and Binance. An official order to finalize the appellate judgment will be developed between the parties in due course.