Coinbase CEO served with a lawsuit for allegedly stealing startup's work
Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, has been served with a lawsuit by a blockchain accelerator, MouseBelt Labs, for allegedly stealing the work of one of its projects: a blockchain-based startup by the name of Knowledgr. The lawsuit concludes that the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States invested in the platform in 2019, but the actual goal was to remove Knowledgr as a competitor.
Coinbase CEO in trouble
The lawsuit was filed in the Supreme Court of California on Friday, and it seems that as per MouseBelt Labs' claims, the firm has been done wrong. As per the lawsuit, Coinbase promised to invest in Knowledgr – a platform used to distribute scientific papers wherein blockchain-based tokens are used as incentives.However, this investment was more of an attempt from Coinbase CEO and related entities to gather information from the startup and use it for their own platform, ResearchHub, on which the firm had been working for a while, eliminating Knowledgr from the equation. As a result, MouseBelt is seeking damages and other forms of compensation.
Knowledgr founder Patrick Joyce
Furthermore, the lawsuit says that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong contacted the founder of Knowledgr, Patrick Joyce, in the month of June 2019 and offered to invest $50,000 personally for a 1% share of his company. The money was wired in mid-July 2009.A lawsuit further said that it was the goal of Armstrong and Coinbase to "steal MouseBelt's work for themselves, to not only eliminate a potential competitor but to obtain for ResearchHub, the benefits of the financial, design and technical resources MouseBelt put into Knowledgr, thereby allowing ResearchHub to launch sooner at less cost a successful platform based entirely or substantially on MouseBelt's work."
Furthermore, according to a report from WashingtonPost, the involvement of Patrick Joyce with Coinbase in the last four months is key evidence. During his time at the crypto exchange, Joyce used the algorithm which was originally preserved for Knowledgr, cutting MouseBelt from the deal.
"MouseBelt asked whether Joyce had recently been in touch with Armstrong or ResearchHub. Joyce stated that neither he nor anyone else at Knowledgr had been in touch with Armstrong during the previous four months. Joyce would later admit the truth, which was that Armstrong had asked Joyce to work on ResearchHub during that same four-month period and that Joyce actually had been doing so. Joyce's omission of this information was a breach of Knowledgr's agreements with MouseBelt and was done to conceal Joyce and Knowledgr's inappropriate actions," said the lawsuit.
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