SAN FRANCISCO — Five groups of plaintiffs lawyers on Thursday jockeyed to lead a proposed investor class action against Tezos, which raised some $232 million in cryptocurrency last year in an initial coin offering (ICO) but has still yet to launch its promised blockchain network.

The various entities behind Tezos, including the California-based Dynamic Ledger Solutions and the Tezos Foundation in Switzerland, face a slew of class actions filed last autumn alleging that they sold unregistered securities. The suits seek to allow investors to have their “Tezzies” tokens refunded; a bid to freeze the project's assets fell flat last year.

Despite initial urging from U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California for plaintiffs attorneys to avoid criticizing each other, the hearing on Thursday quickly descended into a back-and-forth over whether one of the groups vying to lead the case had shown themselves to be incompetent.

The group on the defensive, led by Enoch Liang of LTL Attorneys in South San Francisco and Hung Ta of New York-based Hung G. Ta Esq. PLLC, represent the investor with the largest financial stake in the case so far—Arman Anvari, a former Perkins Coie associate in Chicago who says he poured $264,007.50 worth of Ether into Tezos.

That would normally land Anvari the role of lead plaintiff, and his lawyers the job of lead plaintiff's counsel, under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA). But the lawyers faced criticism over the fact that they missed a filing deadline to lead the class actions, and initially filed their motion in the wrong docket.

Ta downplayed those mistakes, and said the criticism was being leveled by bigger securities firms simply trying to defend their turf. “The opposing counsel clearly resent that someone different … stands to be lead plaintiff,” he said. Ta also called some of the other firms' grouping together of plaintiffs “a sham” and “an end-run around the PSLRA.”

Danielle Myers of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, meanwhile, argued that handing over the case to a firm that made “basic” errors would hurt the representation of the proposed class. “Can you imagine what the defense team will do when they get a crack at it?” she told Seeborg. “That's I think the concern your hearing from the rest of the class.”

“If you're being charged with a case that's the first of its kind,” Myers added, “you should not bungle it out of the gate.” Tezos was the first blockchain company to be hit with civil claims alleging that it issued unregistered securities.

Seeborg, however, seemed reluctant to kick Anvari's lawyers out of the running over the missteps. “In the grand scheme of lawyers making mistakes, that's a pretty small one,” the judge said. “I see a lot worse pretty regularly. ”

San Diego plaintiffs lawyer William Restis, who is representing another group of investors but voiced support for Anvari to lead the class, underscored that being an experienced securities lawyer may not be a leg up in the Tezos case. “
There is no 'wise old man' in the cryptocurrency world, and this is not a typical [securities] action.”

Also vying for the position of lead plaintiffs counsel are the firms Block & Leviton, representing an Australian company called Trigon Trading, and Levi & Korsinsky, representing several plaintiffs calling themselves the “Tezos Investor Group.” Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro also has a case brought under California state law, which the judge said he was inclined to consolidate with the other federal-law cases.

Joel Fleming of Block & Leviton rejected arguments by some of the other attorneys that Trigon should not be lead plaintiff because, as a foreign entity, it is likely to face jurisdictional challenges. He argued that because Dynamic Ledger Solutions is headquartered in California, the issuance of the tokens took place in the United States, meaning that even a foreign company like Trigon can still sue in U.S. federal court.