Altcoin News: Bitmain Intends to Sue $4.3 Million from Ex-Employees Who Founded the Competing Mining Pool
June 17, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
The Chinese mining company Bitmain sued three of its former employees who allegedly violated the contract to refuse competition, CoinDesk writes.
Currently, there are six lawsuits in court: three from the co-founders of the Poolin pool, claiming that they are no longer bound by the terms of the contract with the company, and three from Bitmain, insisting on the opposite.
The operational director of Poolin Fa Zhu in 2015 reported that he and his colleagues suggested Bitmain to open a new mining pool, BTC.com, in parallel with Antpool, which was already available at that time. Bitmain did not support the initiative, and then the three decided to launch it with their own money. Today BTC.com is the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool in terms of hash rates.
Poolin was founded in November 2017 for the extraction of a variety of cryptocurrencies and is currently ranked seventh among the largest mining pools of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was involved in Bitcoin mining in July 2018 and has since received 26,825 BTC or $220 million at the current exchange rate.
Under the terms of the waiver agreement, Bitmain had to pay the Poolin CEO Zhibiao Pan $2,780 a month for two years for refusing to open a Bitcoin mining pool. The amount of compensation for the two other business participants is not specified.
Now the company is trying to recover all payments from the former employee, and also asks to impose a fine in the amount of $667,000 for violating the terms of the contract. In addition, Bitmain lawyers argue that all Bitcoins mined by Poolin are income derived from the failure to comply with the terms of the agreement, the percentage of which is also subject to recovery. The total amount of the claim, in this case, amounts to $4.3 million.
Poolin lawyers, in turn, state that Bitmain itself violated the terms of the agreement when it did not pay Pan in due time and 26,625 BTC obtained by the defendant cannot be considered a direct loss for BTC.com , since there are many pools in the Bitcoin network, all of which were able to receive this cryptocurrency.
Author: Marko Vidrih
