Singapore court barred sale of token from the BAYC collection

What’s new? A court in Singapore has barred the sale of a non-fungible token #2162 from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection due to an ownership dispute. The decision is based on an application by the law firm Withers KhattarWong on behalf of the investor. The defendant is an NFT collector under the pseudonym chefpierre.eth. During the proceedings, the non-fungible token was recognized as an asset. A Withers spokesperson noted that this is the first such decision in a commercial dispute. This is reported on the Withers website.

Information on the Withers website

Details of the case. The investor, who wished to remain anonymous, used BAYC#2162 as collateral to borrow ETH on the NFTfi platform but failed to make payment on time. Due to the breach of agreement, the defendant foreclosed on the plaintiff and transferred the token to a personal wallet, and put it up for sale on the OpenSea marketplace. The plaintiff is now seeking to have the defendant accept the funds to repay the loan and transfer the token to its cryptocurrency wallet. According to the Withers representative, the decision to ban the sale is significant because it implies that the power of the courts extends to digital assets in a decentralized blockchain.

What is known about BAYC? It is one of the most expensive NFT collections created by Yuga Labs. BAYC consists of 10 000 unique digital pictures of monkeys with various attributes of rarity. The collection is based on the Ethereum blockchain in the form of ERC-721 tokens. The minimum price per token as of May 20 is $193610 (95 ETH), according to Binance. Read more about the largest collections of non-fungible digital assets in terms of capitalization in GetBlock Magazine’s article.

What happened before? On April 5, the district court in St. Petersburg for the first time allowed law enforcement agencies to seize the stolen cryptocurrency. The Investigative Committee blocked 24 addresses with 4 000 ETH ($8,2 million at the exchange rate on May 20), which an attacker stole from an investor. Since the concept of cryptocurrencies is not enshrined in the law, it is marked as “other property” in the documents, but a request to seize such assets is permissible, the lawyer explained.