It’s easy to understand why companies are enraged when financial analysts issue damning reports that just so happen to serve the analysts’ own financial interests.
But turning that outrage into a viable defamation lawsuit is very tough, as blockchain developer Dfinity Foundation learned on Monday: U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of Manhattan dismissed Dfinity’s case against crypto analyst Arkham Intelligence, which issued a 2021 report on the precipitous price drop for Dfinity’s ICP token, and against the New York Times, which published an article recounting Arkham’s findings.
Kaplan ruled that Arkham’s allegedly defamatory assertion —that Dfinity insiders had reaped billions by dumping tokens on crypto exchanges at a time when small investors could not access their tokens — was an opinion, not an actionable defamatory statement. Arkham, he said, disclosed the publicly available information underlying its report and “caveated its conclusions” with warnings about the inferences it had drawn from public source material.
Source: New York Times, crypto analyst beat Dfinity defamation claims | Reuters
