According to Justice Neil Gorsuch, parties might agree to have an arbitrator decide on threshold issues of arbitrability in a contract including arbitration.
The Supreme Court of the United States has voided Coinbase’s user agreement, empowering district courts to resolve issues pertaining to Dogecoin sweepstakes prizes.
Exchange of cryptocurrency Dispute resolution provisions in the user agreement were at odds with one another when Coinbase held a promotional event for Dogecoin in June 2021.
Users wanted judicial action in money issues, whereas Coinbase preferred arbitrators. The terms of the platform made clear both choices independently.
Federal and state courts alone will have authority over disputes involving Coinbase’s sweepstakes program, according to a May 23 ruling by the United States Supreme Court.
To determine whether the parties’ second agreement supersedes their first, we find that a court, not an arbitrator, is necessary. We uphold the decision of the Ninth Circuit.
At the same time, Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch stressed that arbitration is all about contracts. Furthermore, he stated:
“As an alternative to going to court, crypto exchanges and users may stipulate in their contracts that an arbitrator will handle both preliminary issues about arbitrability and any arguments on the merits of the case itself.”
Last but not least, the Supreme Court denied Coinbase’s earlier assertions that the court’s stance may “encourage disorder” by making it easier to dispute delegation terms. With the addition of, “We do not think that such pandemonium will follow,” the verdict concluded.
When a contract only contains an arbitration provision, the United States courts do not have the authority to step in and resolve the issue.
One contract may direct users to arbitrate issues, while another may expressly or tacitly direct users to take their conflicts to court. In such a case, the court will have to determine which contract applies.
A recent big outage affected Coinbase’s trading services on both desktop and mobile devices. On May 14, the official X account of Coinbase Support announced the outage. Apparently, they are looking into the problem and trying to figure out a remedy. The account assured its subscribers once again that their money was secure.
The website displayed an error message stating “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” when Cointelegraph attempted to access it. A developer guide on Mozilla states that when this happens, it’s usually because the servers are busy or unavailable for maintenance.
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