Tufty the Cat: Faketoshi Patent Oppositions – The Story So Far

by Stephan Kinsella on April 18, 2025

I have written an article to summarise what has happened over the past 3 years with the oppositions Arthur van Pelt and I have been doing against 3 of Craig “Faketoshi” Wright’s patents. The score is 3-0 but will this change on appeal? We have to wait to find out.
Link below. pic.twitter.com/t0ekXWcP9o

— Tufty Sylvestris (@tuftythecat) April 18, 2025

Faketoshi Patent Oppositions – The Story So Far

For the past few years, in my spare time I have been working on oppositions against three European patents granted to nChain Licensing AG, each of which originated from GB priority applications filed in April 2016. Each patent named Craig Wright and fellow Australian Stephane Savanah as co-inventors. For those few people who may still be unaware, Wright has since 2015 been falsely and fraudulently claiming to be the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Wright’s implausible, and easily disprovable, claims were disputed in late 2015 almost as soon as they became public through engineered leaks to the press. It was, however, only after several lengthy, and extremely costly, legal battles involving many others (including myself), that his claims were finally and comprehensively demolished by Mr Justice Mellor in a mammoth judgment handed down on 20 May 2024 (Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Craig Steven Wright [2024] EWHC 1198). The judgment was appealed by Wright, but permission was denied by Lord Justice Arnold in, for him, an unusually brief 3 page judgment issued on 29 November 2024. There are further strands to the Craig Wright story, including a contempt of court finding, alleged tax fraud in both the UK and his native Australia and a likely upcoming criminal prosecution for perjury, but here is not the place to go into them.

Going back to the beginning, the company nChain was set up in 2016 by Wright and his business partner Stefan Matthews, with help from Canadian businessman Robert MacGregor, and enabled by substantial financial backing from Antiguan-based Canadian online gambling tycoon Calvin Ayre. The stated business aim of the company was to patent and commercialise inventions arising from Wright’s alleged extensive knowledge of Bitcoin and related technology by virtue of his being Satoshi. As explained in the 2016 article by Andrew O’Hagan, “The Satoshi Affair“: