In re Tether and Bitfinex Crypto Asset Litigation
- Katherine Failla
- 1:19-cv-09236
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In re Tether and Bitfinex Crypto Asset Litigation: Judge Failla denied Plaintiffs’ motion to compel additional deposit-and-withdrawal data.
The plaintiffs and the B/T Defendants, particularly their obligations and rights concerning the production of cryptocurrency transaction records before the discovery deadline.
What happened
In In re Tether and Bitfinex Crypto Asset Litigation, the plaintiffs asked the court to require the B/T Defendants to produce complete deposit and withdrawal data for accounts and wallet addresses connected to previously produced trading data.
The court found that the request came unreasonably late, shortly before the discovery deadline, and that the plaintiffs had known since July that the B/T Defendants objected. The court also found that the existing document requests did not cover the additional data.
Judge Failla denied the request and directed the Clerk of Court to terminate the pending motions at docket numbers 462 and 463. The court also warned that no further discovery extensions would be granted.
The detailed version
- In re Tether and Bitfinex Crypto Asset Litigation · No. 1:19-cv-09236
- Katherine Failla
- Oct. 11, 2023
Background
Plaintiffs moved under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37 to compel the B/T Defendants to produce "full deposit and withdrawal data for all accounts and wallet addresses for which they produced trading data" in response to Revised Requests for Production 22–25 and 72. The B/T Defendants opposed the motion, arguing that the requested data was outside the scope of those requests and that plaintiffs waited until shortly before the discovery deadline to seek it.
The record described in the opinion states that the B/T Defendants began providing relevant transaction data in June 2023 and specifically objected to producing the requested deposit and withdrawal data in a July 14, 2023 letter. Plaintiffs waited approximately four months before filing the motion. The B/T Defendants also represented that collecting the additional data would be burdensome and likely could not be completed by the October 23 fact-discovery deadline.
Court’s analysis
The court explained that a party seeking discovery must move to compel within a reasonable period after receiving an objection. It found that plaintiffs’ four-month delay, combined with the approaching discovery deadline and the asserted burden of the request, made the motion unreasonable.
The court also considered the request on its merits and found that the deposit and withdrawal data was outside the scope of the Transaction Requests. Those requests sought specified transaction records and trading data, and the B/T Defendants represented that they had appropriately produced the requested information. The court rejected plaintiffs’ effort to derive a broader request for all deposit and withdrawal data from the narrower requests, noting that other requests had specifically identified deposits and withdrawals when that information was sought.
Ruling
Judge Failla denied plaintiffs’ request to compel production. The court reminded the parties that they would receive no further extensions of the discovery deadline, including for deposition-related issues, and stated that it would view strategic discovery filings or other filings skeptically. The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate the pending motions at docket numbers 462 and 463.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.