Explosive
news around the crypto world is about how Avalanche, AVAX, used the conflicted
mercenary law firm, to bring nuisance law suits on its competing blockchain
projects. The law suits would be class
actions, claimed to be on behalf of investors to claim the competitor is a
‘security’ to attract the attention of the SEC and pressure the
competitor. The discovery process would
then be used to find the commercial secrets of the competing blockchain in an
information haul.
The
mercenary law firm, Roche Freedman, would accept AVAX as payment, effectively
becoming an AVAX partner and therefore hopeless conflicted by any legal ethical
standards. Indeed, it went so far as the
law firm partner moved and lived with the AVAX COO.
AVAX
has a $5b capitalisation, $15B if fully diluted. It was a spectacular performer in 2021. AVAX
surged a whopping 3,300% in 2021, hitting record highs above $140. The basis for the price explosion was
the promise that it would be building DAO’s when DAO’s were all the rage. It didn’t build them of course, just rode the
hype. DAOs are damn hard to build, even
the DAO itself hasn’t built a decent one.
The AVAX blockchain is notable for its pedestrian and uninspiring
features, that offers the technical innovation in this space nothing but more
hype.
This
extraordinary conduct, steeped in illegality and perverting the course of
justice, could just result in AVAX and Roche Freedman bringing attention and
ire of the SEC and Justice Department on them, instead. The consequences of an investigation would
be devasting. Many say that this is the
time to get out of AVAX, fast!!. AVAX
dropped 11% immediately on the news.
Based on supposed hidden camera footage of an
interview with Ava Labs’ lead attorney Kyle Roche, the self-proclaimed
“whistleblowers” claimed the company and firm have worked in tandem to turn the
U.S. legal system against competitors and “pursue [Ava Labs’ CEO] Emin Gün
Sirer’s personal vendettas.”
Kyle
Roche, founding partner at Roche Freedman, had more than a normal lawyer-client
relationship with Ava Labs. According to the report, Ava Labs and Roche
Freedman have used class action
lawsuits to legally assault other companies while keeping the
ire of regulatory agencies off its own projects. In compensation, Roche
received an equity stake in Ava Labs, alongside 1% of the supply of AVAX
tokens, the main token for the Avalanche blockchain.
“We
did a deal where I agreed to provide legal services in exchange for a certain
percentage of the token supply,” Roche said in the spy camera video. Ava Labs
was previously backed by
Andreeson Horowitz as well as groups like Initialized Capital and Polychain.
Still, Roche was “the first” person to gain any stake in the company.
In
a tweet, Crypto Leaks alleged Roche has a big stake in Ava Labs, based on
a lawsuit filed by a
former partner , Jason Cyrulnik.
The whistleblowers claim that all these
lawsuits gave their attorney access to company data granted by discovery, a
pre-trial process by which plaintiffs and defendants in a lawsuit know what
evidence the other side will present during a trial, to gain access to
competitors “investors, contractual agreements with partners, customer lists,”
internal communications, and more. They base this allegation on more hidden
camera video where Roche says: “I sue half the companies in this space, I know
where this market is going… I’ve seen the insides of every single crypto
company.”