US outfit Ready Games gained a legal victory resulting in the freezing of 450 million PLAY tokens – 46% of the total supply – 439 million of which have been transferred to a court-appointed custodian.
The move is part of a dispute between the parent company and Ready Maker (Gibraltar) Limited, the entity it set up to launch the PLAY token, which went live in December 2024.
Ready Games and its original investors, including Bitkraft which led a $8.5 million funding round in 2019, alleged that Ready Maker (Gibraltar) had taken control of the tokens and the underlying technology platform.
It gained a restraining order in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on 3rd January 2025. The latest legal victory happened in the Supreme Court of Gibraltar, which was required to gain access to the PLAY token supply.
Ready Games claims ownership of 150.3 million PLAY tokens, which are worth $2.8 million at current prices, although as a small cap token, only a tiny proportion of these could be sold on the open market, without crashing the price even further. The PLAY token’s price has dropped 72% in the past month.
“The Gibraltar court’s order is a significant first step in restoring proper control of Ready Gibraltar to its rightful stakeholders and ensuring the $PLAY token ecosystem operates as originally intended for the benefit of all token holders,” commented David Bennahum, who was Ready Games’ original CEO, although he left the company in July 2024.
That stated, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Ready Games and the PLAY token. Rebooting the project is one option but it would be a highly complex process and there are few examples of resurrecting a token which has fallen as much in price as PLAY has.
In addition, the latest lawsuit alleged Ready Maker (Gibraltar) CEO Christina Macedo, who was previously Ready Games COO, “breached trust arrangements by claiming personal ownership of Ready Gibraltar and its assets, including the $PLAY token“, so it’s not clear if any of Ready Games’ upper management are still involved with the project.
