Court grants leave for UnitedCorp to submit an amended complaint

Miami, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - January 31, 2020) - Miami-based United American Corp ("UnitedCorp") (OTC Pink: UAMA) announced today that in a ruling issued by Magistrate Judge Chris McAliley of the US District Court, Southern District of Florida on January 28, 2020, the Judge allowed UnitedCorp to continue its antitrust lawsuit originally filed against Bitmain Group, Bitcoin.com, Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, Kraken, Jesse Powell, Amaury Sechet, Shammah Chancellor and Jason Cox (the "Defendants"). UnitedCorp will have 30 days to submit an amended complaint to address certain issues brought up by the Court after it granted without prejudice the motion to dismiss.

The Court also rejected a motion from counsel of the Bitmain Group and Jihan Wu to have them excluded from the complaint due a one-week delay in service in China. In a related ruling on January 21, 2020 the Court denied a motion by UnitedCorp without prejudice for a 90-day extension to serve foreign defendants Saint Bitts LLC and Amaury Sechet.

The two rulings mean that the complaints can be amended but will not include the two defendants that could not be served in foreign jurisdictions. This ruling comes as the result of a motion presented by the Defendants one year ago on February 1, 2019 to dismiss the complaint in its entirety with prejudice.

While the Judge recognized that there were some deficiencies in the initial UnitedCorp complaint which needed further definition in terms of the Defendants' actions and the injuries to the company, UnitedCorp believes the Court recognized that prima facie, there were key questions of law that needed to be addressed and defined in the emerging cryptocurrency industry.

During the hearing, the Judge questioned defense counsel on the role of Kraken as an exchange had in defining the cryptocurrency market and subsequently did not accept, for now, Kraken's assertion that it had no role in the market and therefore could not be part of the antitrust complaint.

Judge McAliley also did not accept for the time being, assertions made by counsels for Ver, Cox and Chancellor that the Defendants' actions by implementing Checkpoints in the software code, amongst other things, resulted in two competitive chains, therefore there were no antitrust issues to be evaluated since the action would have resulted in increased competition. The Court questioned furthermore, whether those actions are now preventing future changes in consensus rules and if the Bitcoin ABC software patch on November 15, 2018 was applied to both network nodes and exchanges.

The Court raised questions about the market value in the Bitcoin Cash ticker (BCH) at the time of the hard fork and questioned if Kraken would have benefited from its delisting of the resulting coin (Bitcoin SV - "BSV") thereby discouraging trading of BSV just after the hard fork.

The Judge continued to questioned counsel for Kraken on the economic basis for the decision to delist Bitcoin SV as well as its arguments to the effect that BSV would have been unstable with lack of liquidity since this seemed to be the case for many other cryptocurrencies traded on Kraken - not just BSV.

In its defense Kraken counsel argued that it was obliged to disclose to their clients that it believed there was a lack of liquidity in the BSV market which required the immediate delisting of BSV, an argument which was not accepted by the Court at this stage in the proceedings.

One of the more interesting points raised by the Judge in the hearing was whether the US Federal Court could rule on whether or not the Satoshi Nakamoto White Paper of October 31, 2008 (the "White Paper") which initially defined Bitcoin, could be considered as a binding contract or rules among the users in the Bitcoin industry. The Court left open the possibility that this question might have to be addressed at some point.

"We are very pleased with the outcome of the January 28th hearing and that the Court has given us the opportunity to provide additional information and resubmit an amended complaint," stated Benoit Laliberte, President and CEO of UnitedCorp. "We believe the Court has recognized the importance of establishing law in what has been to date, a fairly undefined environment. Bitcoin was developed as a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer electronic cash system operating under democratic principles created within the network. Any move to centralize or control the network is against its very philosophy and foundation. We are very encouraged by the interest this has generated from antitrust professionals, most of whom agree that this suit is very timely given that antitrust laws are now almost 100 years old, and furthermore that it is time to assess the limits and legality of actions within the cryptocurrency industry."

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