Blockchain locks legal horns with ‘copycat’ Blockchain.io

Cryptocurrency wallet venture Blockchain has filed a complaint in a US federal court against a company calling itself Blockchain.io.

The latter is linked to Paymium, an ‘Instawallet’, which in 2013 lost its users’ funds in a high profile hack. Soon afterwards, the company officially closed its claims process, leaving many of its users with substantial financial losses. Paymium then rebranded to Blockchain.io, with the Founder and CDO, Pierre Noizat, back in charge. It is about to launch an ICO using the Blockchain.io name.

“We have strong concerns about how they are representing their offer. They claim to raise money to offer some technologies that don’t actually exist,” Blockchain says in a blog post.

“They also claim the ICO is registered with the SEC but there’s no registration statement in place for the offering.This means users won’t be able to trade the token publicly as Paymium led them to believe. The SEC just announced last week an enforcement action against an ICO project that made this same misrepresentation. Similarly, Blockchain.io claim that their ICO is registered with the French regulator the ACPR, but we can find no evidence of this.”

It is also alleged that Blockchain.io are trying to pass themselves off to customers as Blockchain. The latter flags up a “worrying number of name and branding similarities” including “similar domain name to our website (blockchain.io); similar colours to our website (shades of dark blue); similar logo (a cube instead of a square) made up of similar geometric shapes (circles instead of rounded boxes); Repurposed our tagline “connecting the world to crypto” through a thesaurus to come up with “your gateway to the internet of value.”

No ICO

Blockchain says that it has been receiving questions from people who have come across blockchain.io and asked whether it is doing an ICO. “Blockchain is not doing an ICO. When we inspected blockchain.io’s social media and Telegram channels, we discovered that many more people had assumed that blockchain.io was Blockchain,” it states.

“To protect our users and maintain the trust we’ve worked so hard to build, we’ve had to take action. Today we filed a complaint in US federal court. We’ll file more complaints in other courts if we need to and we will continue to fight false and misleading statements that endanger the crypto community,” it concludes.

Blockchain.io hits back

The company has contacted Coin Rivet with the following statement: “Paymium, which has been successfully been operating a BTC/EUR exchange since 2013 and serving 170,000 customers, is currently closing its private ICO to accelerate the roll-out of Blockchain.io. The public sale for this complementary cryptocurrency exchange service will start on 27th September. The domain name Blockchain.io was registered by Paymium way back in April 2012 and the Blockchain.io project launch was publicly advertised in the press months ago.”

“Three days before the beginning of the sale, and a few weeks away from the official release of our platform, it thus comes as no surprise that we are challenged by some potential competitors. We condemn this approach, which surely doesn’t comply with crypto-community values. Moreover, Blockchain.io disputes the accusation of making false and misleading statements. What is at stake is, at first, the protection of our name, our reputation, and our loyal investors and customers.”

“For these reasons, our lawyers will answer point by point the claims that have been made. As for our ICO, we already provided early investors with the alpha version of our platform that is ready to be launched right after the public sale in November. The name blockchain.io is the legal property of Paymium and the public sale will start as planned on 27th September.”