Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) developers who pushed investors to move their tokens to the BitGrail exchange which was subsequently hacked face the prospect of a day in court after a class action lawsuit was brought against them. The developers used the Nano/RaiBlocks community page on the popular community site Reddit to encourage NANO/XRB holders to take the action while awaiting the release of a new wallet around the same time as the name change and re-brand was taking place, only for $170 million worth of XRB tokens to be “lost” shortly after at the exchange, and the investors want to hold the developers to account.
Promoters Breached Securities Laws, Allege Holders
BitGrail was hacked in February 2018, just days after XRB had rocketed over 40% in price following the announcement of the Nano rebrand, with the exchange seeing around 17 million XRB tokens stolen, worth some $170 million at the time. This followed weeks of developers in the Reddit community channel “directing the investing public to purchase XRB through BitGrail by providing specific investment instructions and assurances that the cryptocurrency exchange was secure and could be trusted to safeguard investment assets”, according to the lawsuit. The suit also alleges that, “The Nano Defendants developed XRB, which they each promoted, offered, traded and sold for their personal financial benefit to the general public”, breaching securities laws.
Promoter Responsibility a Gray Area
Those who were present for the 2017/18 bull run will likely have memories of XRB/NANO as much for its relentless promotion as for its incredible price action, with the latter being an undisputed result of the former – the token ran from $4.70 to $34 in little over a week in December 2017. How much responsibility promoters have over the actions of investors is of course a gray area that differs with every case, and it has to be said that these same promoters will have helped hundreds if not thousands of people, perhaps even some of those taking part in the action, to become very rich almost overnight, so it can’t be said that their actions had a completely deleterious effect on the token holding community, it just depends which of their advice you took.
