Getting Served – And Convicted – Via NFT

TL;DR

• A federal judge in Florida has just ruled in favor of a plaintiff who just sued an anonymous hacker.

• $971,291 worth of USDT (a stablecoin) was stolen from Rangan Bandyopadhyay’s Coinbase wallet in December 2021.

• The Judge determined that 1) NFTs constituted a legitimate form of legal notification for these defendants (for the first time ever in the US), and 2) that the perpetrator(s) must pay the full amount back, plus interest which would accrue every month until paid off.

Full Story

Last year, we wrote about how it was allowed in the UK to serve legal notice via NFT.

Fast forward a few months, and a federal judge in Florida has just ruled in favor of a plaintiff who just sued an anonymous hacker.

The formal legal notice was given via NFT.

Let’s sum up what happened in a few lines:

• $971,291 worth of USDT (a stablecoin) was stolen from Rangan Bandyopadhyay’s Coinbase wallet in December 2021.

• Bandy, nor anyone, know/knew who the hackers were.

• What was known, was that the hackers tricked the victim into linking his Coinbase wallet to a fake liquidity mining project, and then drained the wallet entirely. Because of this, the notice was served to the wallet that the funds went into.

• What is also known (through the power of the immutable ledger that is blockchain technology), is that the funds went from the hackers wallet, to several other wallets (in an attempt to hide it), and eventually landed in a Binance Exchange Pool.

• The Judge determined that NFTs constituted a legitimate form of legal notification for these defendants (for the first time ever in the US), and that the perpetrator(s) must pay the full amount back, plus interest which would accrue every month until paid off.

This is big news. It sets a precedence for future cases to be served via NFT.

At the same time, it’s entirely unclear who the hackers are.

So if, IF, they figure out who the offender(s) are, and they turn out to reside outside of the US; well that may make the whole ‘return the payment plus interest’ thing void.

Still, seems like progress, and yet another interesting use case for Web3.