Roger Ver Says He Won’t Pay Genesis $20M For Bad Trades
Do bad crypto trades go away if your counterparty goes bankrupt? Bitcoin Cash backer Roger Ver apparently hopes so
Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver | Source: LeWeb/"Roger Ver" (CC license), modified by Blockworks
Bitcoin Cash proponent Roger Ver is once again feuding with an embattled crypto company over bad trades worth millions of dollars — this time, it’s a subsidiary of bankrupt lender Genesis.
Genesis subsidiary GGC International filed a court summons in New York earlier this week, demanding Ver pay no less than $20 million to cover a set of crypto options, which expired at the end of December.
Ver, once referred to as “Bitcoin Jesus” for his BTC evangelism before staunchly supporting the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in 2017, says he won’t be paying up.
In a Reddit post Wednesday, Ver claimed he has enough funds to pay Genesis, and even said he’d be “happy to pay,” but it’s Genesis that failed to hold up its end of the bargain.
“… Genesis was required by our agreement to remain solvent — as Genesis can’t ask its clients to play a ‘heads clients lose, tails Genesis wins’ game,” Ver wrote. He further claimed that he’d asked Genesis in June for assurances of its solvency, but didn’t receive what he wanted to know.
GGC International is a British Virgin Island company that facilitates crypto derivatives and spot trading, according to Genesis’ website.
Genesis, itself a subsidiary of Barry Silbert’s crypto-conglomerate Digital Currency Group, filed for bankruptcy last week, about two months after halting customer withdrawals and loan originations. But GGC International hasn’t filed for bankruptcy just yet.
Blockworks has reached out to both Ver and Genesis for comment.
While it’s unclear whether courts will compel Ver to cover the expired options, this isn’t the first time he’s been challenged on trading debt.
Last July, he was entangled with a smaller platform, CoinFLEX, after CEO Mark Lamb accused him of owing the company $47 million in USDC after he failed to meet a margin call.
CoinFLEX later filed legal action in Hong Kong against Ver, saying its estimated losses from Ver’s refusal to pay the debt, which had nearly doubled to $84 million.
Ver denied owing CoinFLEX and instead alleged the now-bankrupt exchange actually left him out of pocket.
Updated Jan. 27, 2023 at 4:16 am ET: Added context in first paragraph.
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