A group of people who control hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency raised to support the convoy protests that snarled Ottawa for weeks have agreed to hand the money over to an escrow agent, in case a court rules it should be used to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit.

Christopher Garrah, Nicholas St. Louis, and Benjamin Dichter will transfer the money raised through the Adopt-a-Trucker and HonkHonk Hodl fundraisers, denominated in cryptocurrency and government-issued currency to KSV Restructuring.

Paul Champ, an Ottawa-based lawyer who is representing the plaintiffs in the proposed class action, said he expects the defendants to transfer at least six bitcoins, worth over $311,000, to the escrow agent on Monday. 

On Feb. 17 and 18, St. Louis, who goes by the Twitter handle @nobodycaribou, distributed an additional 14 bitcoins, worth over $728,000, at the Ottawa protest against COVID-19 restrictions and other grievances. He did so by going from truck to truck, giving protestors “paper wallets”—envelopes with passwords and instructions for claiming the cryptocurrency.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs believe St. Louis still has the passwords for the Bitcoin wallets, stored in the memory of the printer he used to print the paper copies. If he provides those passwords to the escrow agent, the court will have control of any bitcoins the truckers have not yet transferred to other digital wallets. Only 38 out of 100 wallets have been claimed, according to HonkHonk Hodl’s tracker.

Norman Groot, a lawyer for the defendants, said in an Ottawa court Monday that Garrah, Dichter and St. Louis “are willing to cooperate, do whatever is necessary to transfer any crypto they may control to the escrow,” although “that may not be able to satisfy all the crypto that is donated.”

St. Louis’s agreement to cooperate and transfer the bitcoins from the fundraiser to the court’s control represents an about-face from his previous online statements. “The lawsuit has zero grounds and has no justified claim on the funds,” he tweeted on Feb. 25, as part of a thread detailing the fundraiser’s efforts to distribute the bitcoins and keep them in safe custody as “things were heating up beyond expectations.”

It would also represent a significant development in a case widely seen to be a test of Bitcoin’s ability to resist governments’ efforts to restrict funding to political movements. Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell, respectively the CEOs of the prominent international cryptocurrency-trading platforms Coinbase and Kraken, have posted tweets that appear to offer advice to crypto users on how to evade emergency restrictions on funding for the protests, prompting the Ontario Securities Commission to report them to the police.

Monday’s court appearance also extended until March 9 a Mareva Order freezing millions of dollars in additional funds raised in support of the convoy protest. The injunction is intended to prevent convoy organizers from spending the funds raised in support of the demonstration—through cryptocurrency, crowdfunding campaigns and other methods—that might be available to the Ottawa residents and business owners who make up the proposed class in the lawsuit and who allege they suffered personal harm and loss of revenue as a result of the demonstration.

In an interview with The Logic, Champ said the plaintiffs’ legal team applied for the injunction to prevent the funds from being distributed once the emergency orders the federal government enacted on Feb. 14 were lifted. They went to court to obtain the order on Feb. 17 after noticing activity on the Bitcoin blockchain showing the creation of more than 100 new wallets with funds from the HonkHonk Hodl fundraiser, which they took as an indication the money was about to be disbursed.

“We want to maintain control over those funds, ensure that they remain frozen,” he said. “For compensation for the people who were harmed.”

St. Louis, Garrah and Dichter did not immediately respond to requests for comment placed to them directly and through their lawyers.