With $6 million in seed funding, the help of blockchain firm Ava Labs, and the partnership of a Norwegian venture capitalist with a network of high-value legal claims around the world, attorney Kyle Roche thought he could change the world of litigation finance—maybe the world altogether.

Roche, in February, pitched crypto investor Christen Ager-Hanssen on the vision behind Ryval, a startup aiming to be the first stock market for litigation funding. “I believe that such a fund structure could be a powerful economic and political tool because it could control whether or not certain high-value cases get litigated through judgment,” he wrote at the time.