Creditors of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange CoinFLEX are suing the company’s co-founder and former CEO Mark Lamb over his involvement in Open Exchange (OPNX).

According to the creditors, Lamb breached his fiduciary duties at CoinFLEX when he started OPNX, which creditors argue is a ‘competing business’ to CoinFLEX.

Aside from Lamb, the lawsuit also named Roger Ver as a defendant.

Unauthorised Rebranding And Competing Interests In OPNX

In a Linkedin post, Leslie Lamb (Mark Lamb’s wife and currently CEO of OPNX) stated that ‘CoinFLEX will be officially rebranding to Open Exchange.’

However, this had apparently not been approved by CoinFLEX’s board or creditors, and creditors insisted that Lamb had gone rogue and appropriated the company’s intellectual property, technology, customer base, and employees to build OPNX.

The creditors accuse Lamb of entering into a licensing and purchase agreement with OPNX’s parent companies that was ‘manifestly uncommercial and detrimental to CoinFLEX’s interests’, and are seeking to have the agreement rendered null and void. Creditors have also demanded that all assets and profits from OPNX be put into a trust for now.

OPNX’s Controversial Opening

In January, a pitch deck for the new exchange was leaked, naming Su Zhu, Kyle Davies, Mark Lamb, and Sudhu Arumugam as founders.

At the time, the new name for the company was GTX, a play on FTX’s name since the exchange had just gone bust several months ago.

The main controversy was the involvement of Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the co-founders of 3 Arrows Capital. During the bull market, the two co-founders had been held up as leaders of the industry, but following the Terra-Luna crash, the company was ordered into liquidation.

Their return to the spotlight was met with twitter users mocking them not only for the collapse of 3AC, but also the new proposal for an exchange.

Su Zhu and Kyle Davies had been ordered to cooperate with investigations into the company’s collapse, but had apparently not been doing so. Their whereabouts were unknown at the time, but Su Zhu was arrested at Singapore’s Changi Airport earlier this month.

The exchange later opened under the name OPNX, under the leadership of Mark Lamb’s wife, Leslie Lamb.

Involvement of Roger Ver

While Ver had originally been a prominent investor in CoinFLEX, the relationship did not prove to be a lasting one.

In the aftermath of the Terra-Luna collapse, CoinFLEX failed to liquidate a position that Ver had held on the platform, resulting in the exchange’s eventual collapse. Ver began an arbitration case against Coinflex later that year, seeking 200 million in damages and alleging that he had evidence that ‘third parties were provided with knowledge of my sizable positions on CoinFLEX and traded against them to my detriment.”

The case was eventually settled out of court. Currently, Ver is also named as a defendant in the new case, and creditors are seeking to recoup any ‘benefits or traceable proceeds’ that Ver received as part of the settlement with Lamb.

Ver states that he has not yet been served in connection to the new case.