Skycoin v. Stephens, 22-cv-00708, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Chicago) against multiple defendants, including former contractors and two journalists. The former contractors are being sued for damages for carrying out a fraudulent invoice scam and their involvement in kidnapping Skycoin founder Brandon Smietana and his girlfriend in order to steal crypto assets. The two journalists are being sued for receiving money to publish false and defamatory statements against the company as part of an extortion racket.
On February 8, 2022, Skycoin Global Foundation Singapore filed a federal lawsuit against Bradford Stephens, Harrison Gevirtz f/k/a 'HaRRo', Ryan Eagle, Andrew Young, former Eagle Web Assets (EWA) associates Aaron Kunstman and Joel Wayne Cuthriell AKA 'Caribou', as well as Morgan Peck, Tristan Greene, Bryan Clark, Catherine Byerly, Steven Leonard, and Josh Ogle of Far Ahead Marketing for actions that occurred between 2018 and 2022.
Smietana was an early developer of Bitcoin and a crypto industry pioneer who participated in writing code for the world's first cryptocurrency along with Satoshi Nakamoto. Skycoin was founded in 2012 to fix the outstanding issues with Bitcoin and was one of the first corporations involved in developing Web3. Skycoin developed and prototyped Obelisk, a low energy distributed database consensus, to enable zero CO2 and provide an alternative to the legacy blockchain consensus, which involves high overhead, such as the wasteful and energy intensive Proof of Work (PoW) consensus. Skycoin is also active in developing new telecommunication protocols for next generation internet, such as Skycoin's Skywire virtual cloud and software defined networking (SDN).
During its launch in 2013, Skycoin created and distributed 100 million units of digital property called Skycoin tokens. By January of 2018, the Skycoin token's total market capitalization surpassed 5 billion US dollars.
Amidst the Wild West conditions that...