UK court partially dismisses $13.3B lawsuit against Binance

The Court of Appeal in the UK partly dismissed a lawsuit that Bitcoin SV investors had filed against Binance and other major crypto exchanges for allegedly working together to take down the token in 2019.

These investors had asked for $13,397,932,170 in damages, saying that Binance’s and others removal of BSV from its list of crypto took away their chance to make money from its possible rise to become a “top-tier cryptocurrency” like Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. 

This was 352 times the original value of BSV held by “sub-class B” investors. However, The court said that investors who held BSV during the delisting time (called “sub-class B”) did not have the right to billions of dollars in speculative damages based on BSV’s possible growth.

Crypto volatility comes into play against the investors.

The court didn’t agree with this “foregone growth effect” theory. They said, “BSV was obviously not a unique cryptocurrency without reasonably similar substitutes,” citing the representative’s use of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as examples.

The court said that cryptocurrencies are, by their nature, volatile investments. Therefore, treating them as if they were real property is impossible. “They are tradable assets, equivalent (in this context) to shares, derivatives or other tradable financial instruments.”

“It would be unthinkable for the holders of freely tradable shares, whose value had been reduced by tortious conduct, to be able to claim more than the current value of those shares to compensate them for the prospect that their value might have substantially increased in the future. The same principle applies here. It is called the market mitigation rule.” The court added.

According to the court, the token holders had to choose once they learned about the supposedly wrong delisting events. 

They could keep their BSV coins if they wanted to, but that didn’t give them the right to say that their losses should be calculated based on the value of a different crypto token that did better at some unspecified date in the future. Once they learned about the delisting events, the defendants had nothing to do with the investments they made.

Other smaller claims may still go forward

In the end, Binance’s limited strike-out application was granted. The court said that holders could never claim more than the total value of their holding before the delisting events, plus any quantifiable consequential losses. This is regardless of whether some holders didn’t know about the delisting.

The judge also narrowed the case, which is now also against Kraken, ShapeShift, and Bittylicious for taking the BSV token off their platforms in 2019.

However, while the Appeal Court dismissed the largest part of the lawsuit against Binance, some smaller claims may still go forward. Some of these are claims from buyers who couldn’t get to their BSV after it was taken off of exchanges or who sold it quickly after the delisting and lost money.

This case comes after the UK continues to regulate the crypto industry. As reported by Cryptopolitan,  the country requires crypto companies to collect and report data from every customer trade and transfer beginning Jan. 1, 2026, as part of a broader effort to improve crypto tax reporting.

Meanwhile, Dune Analytics says that Binance Wallet recorded more than $5 billion in daily crypto wallet trade volume. 95.3% of the trading volume share was tracked across 12 major wallets. 

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