Coinbase has suspended a restraining order requested by BiT Global as a California court ruled for the decision to list the Bitcoin Wrapped exchange.
The Hong Kong-based company BiT Global is said to be linked to crypto entrepreneur and Tron founder Justin Sun, who had sought an injunction to prevent Coinbase from removing Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), arguing that it would cause “irreparable” damage to his business. The ruling from US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín allows the list to move forward as planned. The court too seen that”self-inflicted wounds are not permanent injuries”, suggesting that BiT Global's alleged injury resulted from BiT Global's own actions and decisions and that Coinbase was not listing.
As covered by crypto.news earlier, the American cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase revealed on November 19 that it will remove wBTC from its platform on December 19. The decision came as a result of Coinbase's regular review process, which BiT Global said was biased. The company subsequently filed a lawsuit alleging violations of competition and disparagement laws, claiming that the exchange damaged wBTC's reputation by promoting its own tokenized Bitcoin product, cbBTC. Coinbase's legal counsel characterized the suit as frivolous and suggested that sanctions could be imposed against BiT Global and its counsel. They pointed to the failure of evidence to support claims that Coinbase's actions had caused users to abandon wBTC.
Coinbase, as a private company, defended its decision and commented . A spokesperson for the exchange denied the allegations, saying that they have the right to decide whether to register a token or not. The company further denied allegations of monopolistic behavior, saying it represented less than one percent of wBTC's trading activity. cbBTC, on the other hand, has been off since September. launchwith a market cap higher than $2.11 billion.
BiT Global also said that Justin Sun, the company's consultant, had been wrongly implicated in the scandal. However, Coinbase pointed to Sun's predecessor charges financial misconduct and argued that his distance from wBTC was a strategic decision. BiT Global also stated that wBTC is vital to the crypto ecosystem and defended their position by accusing Coinbase of unbiased listing policies and accusing an exchange of meme coins named Mogcoin (MOG) and pepe (PEIP) has little purpose.
However, many crypto enthusiasts side with BiT Global saying that Coinbase's decision to list wBTC is because they don't like Justin Sun”. Longer critics an argument that wBTC is more suitable than CBBTC providing proof of reserves, unlike its competitor. A token requires proof of reserves to prove that an issuer has sufficient assets to support the token and to extend transparency and trust. For folding tokens such as wBTC or cbBTC, it shows that each token is actually 1:1 backed by the original asset, in this case, Bitcoin (BTC). On the other hand, without proof of resources, each user is at greater risk of bankruptcy, fraud, or mismanagement by the publisher.
