MouseBelt Sues Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, Steals Data From Blockchain Startup Work
- MouseBelt filed suit against Brian Armstrong in the California Supreme Court.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong allegedly stole the work of a blockchain accelerator under the guise of investing in one of his projects.
On October 7, last Friday, MouseBelt Labs filed a complaint with the California Supreme Court, highlighting that in June 2019, Brian Armstrong proposed to invest in Knowledgr, a platform that circulates scientific articles along with tokens offered as an incentive so that he can use secret data for research a likewise platform that he worked on and can destroy experts a participant.
The complaint filed by MouseBelt Labs against Armstrong highlights Brian providing financial support to the experts in which the company MouseBelt was already an investor and the opportunity to list the token on Coinbase. The accelerator alleges that Armstrong, Coinbase and affected institutions fraudulently interfered with a contract and were unjustly rich on other claims.
The firm is seeking damages and other forms of relief as part of the jury trial.
MouseBelt also accused CEO Armstrong of contacting founder Patrick Joyce at the end of June 2019 to individually invest $50,000 for just a 1% stake in Coinbase, creating a large investment property for real hard work. $50,000 was sent to knowledge in the second half of July.
According to the complaint, it is mentioned that Brian’s goal was “to steal MouseBelt’s work for himself, not only to eliminate a potential competitor, but to provide ResearchHub with the benefits of the financial, design and technical resources MouseBelt invested in Knowledgr, thereby allow ResearchHub to launch faster and at lower cost a successful platform based entirely or substantially on MouseBelt’s work.”
The complaint highlights that Brian promised Joyce a job opportunity if he would contribute to ResearchHub while holding the position of CEO of Knowledgr while misleading MouseBelt Labs in the process.
At this point, MouseBelt also blames Joyce for using an algorithm originally intended for Knowledgr for ResearchHub instead.
MouseBelt questioned whether Joyce had been in recent contact with Armstrong or ResearchHub. In response to MouseBelt’s questions, Joyce stated that neither he nor anyone else at Knowledgr had been in contact with Armstrong in the previous four months.
The lawsuit claimed that Joyce was later able to admit the truth: Armstrong had asked Joyce to work at ResearchHub at the same time. The leak of this information was a breach of Knowledgr’s agreements with MouseBelt and was done to cover up Joyce and Knowledgr’s inappropriate actions.”
Earlier on October 6, TheCoinRepublic reported that the Shopify CEO bought $3 million worth of Coinbase shares over the past 2 months. On August 11, Lütke bought 3,930 COIN shares at $97.24 each. On August 16, Lütke bought 4,023 shares at $90.55 each, five days later.
According to the acquisition documents, since August 11 he has been paying approximately $369,500 per week for COIN shares. Shopify’s billionaire founder and CEO is a core member of the Ruby on Rails project and deeply interested in technology.
