Millennium Chambers is pleased to report a successful outcome in the Court of Appeal for cryptocurrency exchange Kyrrex Ltd, in which Mark Lorrell appeared as part of the team led by Brad Pomfret KC, with Ian Chai, instructed by The Brooke Law Group LLP.
On 28 September 2026, the Court of Appeal unanimously ruled in Kyrrex’s favour in Jones v Persons Unknown and Kyrrex Ltd [2026] EWCA Civ 1212. It cancelled parts of a court order that had led to 98.2 Bitcoin being taken from Kyrrex’s account.
Mr Jones lost Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency scam after being persuaded to invest through a fake online trading platform. He took the case to the High Court, and in 2022 he won an order against the unknown fraudsters and against Huobi, a crypto exchange that controlled the digital wallet where he believed his Bitcoin had ended up.
The order required 98.2 Bitcoin to be transferred to Mr Jones from that wallet. Huobi complied, then took the same amount from the account of Kyrrex, another crypto exchange that used the wallet.
Kyrrex had not been part of the case and was not told about it before the order was made. It was later accepted that Mr Jones’s Bitcoin had never actually been in that wallet.
Under the court rules, someone who is not a party to a case can ask the court to cancel an order if they are “directly affected” by it. Kyrrex applied on that basis. The High Court refused, deciding that Kyrrex was only indirectly affected.
The Court of Appeal disagreed with the High Court. It found that Kyrrex was directly affected, because the order led to Bitcoin being taken from its account. The court also found that the time Kyrrex took to bring its application, and the arguments about the strength of its case, were not good reasons to leave the order in place. It cancelled the relevant parts of the order.
Lord Justice Peter Jackson said the order had made Kyrrex “the unwitting insurer of his loss”.
This is the first time the Court of Appeal has given detailed guidance on when a business or person outside a case can challenge a court order that affects them. The court said this can apply in a wide range of situations. The person does not have to prove they have already lost out; it is enough that the order could seriously affect their legal rights.
The court also questioned whether judges should order legal costs to be paid in cryptocurrency, noting that it knew of no previous case where this had been done.
The ruling is likely to be relevant to crypto exchanges, businesses caught up in fraud claims, and anyone whose assets are affected by a court case they were not part of.
The full judgment is available on the National Archives website: https://caselaw.
