[PUBLISH] 

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT

________________________

No. 20-10894

________________________

D.C. Docket No. 1:17-cv-24500-RNS

JACOB ZOWIE THOMAS RENSEL, 

individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, 

WANG YUN HE, 

CHI HAO POON, 

KING FUNG POON, 

JAE J. LEE, 

MATEUSZ GANCZREK, 

RODNEY WARREN, 

 Plaintiffs - Appellants,

 versus

CENTRA TECH, INC., 

 Defendant - Appellee,

SOHRAB SHARMA, et al.,

 Defendants.

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 1 of 25
2

________________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Florida

________________________

(June 29, 2021)

Before LAGOA, ANDERSON, and MARCUS, Circuit Judges.

MARCUS, Circuit Judge: 

The plaintiffs in this putative securities fraud class action filed a motion for 

class certification as early as they realistically could have, but the district court

denied it as untimely. The plaintiffs did not miss any rule-based or court-ordered 

deadline for their class certification motion. Nor did their timing cause prejudice 

to any party. The case calendar effectively deprived them of any opportunity to 

conduct discovery in support of class certification. Under the circumstances of this 

case, including the near omnipresence of an automatic discovery stay imposed by 

the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act whenever a motion to dismiss is 

pending -- in effect for just under fifteen of the eighteen months between the initial 

complaint and the plaintiffs’ certification motion -- the district court’s timeliness 

holding was an abuse of discretion. 

The district court also erred when it denied certification on the alternative 

ground that the plaintiffs had not established an administratively feasible method 

for identifying class members. Rule 23 implicitly requires that a proposed class be 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 2 of 25
3

ascertainable; that is, the class must be “adequately defined such that its 

membership is capable of determination.” Cherry v. Dometic Corp., 986 F.3d 

1296, 1304 (11th Cir. 2021). But our recent decision in Cherry clarified that to 

meet this ascertainability requirement, the party seeking certification need not 

establish its ability to identify class members in a convenient or administratively 

feasible manner. Of course, considerations of administrative feasibility may still 

be relevant to Rule 23(b)(3)(D) manageability analysis. Id. 

We therefore vacate the district court’s order denying the plaintiffs’ motion 

for class certification and remand for further proceedings. 

I.

The real action in this appeal is found in its procedural history, but a bit of 

substantive background is in order. Riding the recent wave of enthusiasm for 

cryptocurrencies, Centra Tech, Inc. got off to a fast start. Centra Tech promised to 

market the Centra Wallet, a digital wallet for storing different kinds of 

cryptocurrencies, and the Centra Card, a Visa and Mastercard-backed debit card 

that would allow users to make everyday purchases with cryptocurrencies. To 

raise funds to develop these products, Centra Tech held an initial coin offering 

(“ICO”) between July 2017 and April 2018. The ICO involved the sale of Centra 

Tokens, which entitled the holder to certain rights related to Centra Tech -- in other 

words, Centra Tokens were securities similar to the stock sold at an initial public 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 3 of 25
4

offering. Centra Tech enlisted the promotional services of longtime world 

championship boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and double-platinum-selling hip-hop 

producer DJ Khaled to publicize the ICO to potential investors. Apparently 

impressed, thousands of investors participated in the ICO to enable Centra Tech to 

raise $32 million. 

But Centra Tech’s fortunes -- and those of its investors -- soon crashed. 

Centra Tech, it turned out, had not been truthful with the ICO purchasers. For one 

thing, Visa and Mastercard had not actually signed on to support the Centra Card. 

Nor were Centra Tech’s digital currency holdings insured, despite assurances 

otherwise. Centra Tech also tried to boost its investor appeal by listing fake 

executives. Centra Tech personnel even fabricated a LinkedIn profile for the 

fictional “Michael Edwards,” who was supposedly a Harvard professor and Centra 

Tech co-founder. Centra Tech’s real-life founders, Sohrab Sharma, Raymond 

Trapani, and Robert Farkas pled guilty to criminal securities and wire fraud 

charges in the Southern District of New York; the SEC also sued them for 

securities fraud. See United States v. Sharma et al., No. 18-cr-340-LGS, ECF Nos. 

152, 427, 470 (S.D.N.Y.); S.E.C. v. Sharma et al., No. 18-cv-2909-DLC, ECF 

(S.D.N.Y.). The SEC action remains stayed pending final resolution of the 

criminal case (Trapani, who cooperated with the government, has not yet been 

sentenced). 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 4 of 25
5

ICO investor Jacob Rensel filed the instant suit against Centra Tech and 

some of its principals in the Southern District of Florida on December 13, 2017. 

He alleged the sale of unregistered securities in violation of Sections 12(a)(1) and 

15(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. §§ 77l(a)(1), 77o(a)). The 

defendants moved to dismiss on February 2, 2018, triggering an automatic stay on 

“all discovery and other proceedings” under the Private Securities Litigation 

Reform Act of 1995 (“PSLRA”). 15 U.S.C. § 78u-4(b)(3)(B) (“In any private 

action arising under this chapter, all discovery and other proceedings shall be 

stayed during the pendency of any motion to dismiss, unless the court finds upon 

the motion of any party that particularized discovery is necessary to preserve 

evidence or to prevent undue prejudice to that party.”).

Rensel (together with Wang Yun He, who had been named co-lead plaintiff) 

moved for leave to file an amended complaint on May 29, 2018. On September 

25, 2018, the district court granted this motion and simultaneously denied the stillpending motion to dismiss as moot. Thus, the PSLRA automatic discovery stay 

lifted on September 25. But this pause was short lived. Rensel, together with He, 

Chi Hao Poon, King Fung Poon, Jae Lee, Mateusz Ganczarek, and Rodney Warren 

(the “Plaintiffs”) filed an amended class action complaint on October 9, 2018. 

They repeated the unregistered securities claims from the first complaint and added 

allegations of material misrepresentations in violation of Sections 10(b) and 20(a) 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 5 of 25
6

of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. § 78j(b)) against Centra Tech; 

its founders Sharma, Trapani, and Farkas; its executives Steven Stanley, Steven 

Sykes, Allan Shutt, and Chase Zimmerman; and ICO promoters Mayweather and 

Khaled. Sykes, Mayweather, and Khaled moved to dismiss the amended 

complaint on December 21, 2018. The PSLRA stay therefore kicked in once again

on that day. Other defendants filed motions to dismiss later: Stanley on January 

16, 2019 and Shutt on April 26. 

Earlier, on November 19, 2018, the district court had ordered the parties to 

advise whether they preferred a standard or expedited case schedule (with outlines 

of each attached to the order), or whether they had good reasons to request a more 

protracted schedule. The parties timely responded with a Joint Discovery Plan and 

Status Report. The defendants requested an extended schedule, in part because of

the need for discovery related to class certification. Thus, the defendants proposed 

a schedule premised on the PSLRA stay expiring by March 20, 2019; this schedule 

suggested that the court impose a June 14, 2019 deadline for the Plaintiffs to file a 

motion for class certification. The Plaintiffs, in turn, opined that the court’s 

standard schedule would suffice “if cued from the time of the adjudication of all 

pending motions to dismiss and the filing of Answers by defendants,” but observed 

that the court needed to add a deadline for their class certification motion. 

Notably, the Plaintiffs also informed the district court that it would be 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 6 of 25
7

“inappropriate and unfair” to commence the discovery schedule until after the 

PSLRA stay had been lifted. The district court did not follow up with a scheduling 

order adopting its own or any party’s proposed schedule; thus, the court never

imposed a deadline for the Plaintiffs’ class certification motion. 

At the Plaintiffs’ request, the Clerk entered default against Centra Tech on 

January 31, 2019 for failure to appear. The district court granted Sykes’s, 

Mayweather’s, Khaled’s, and Stanley’s motions to dismiss in a May 1, 2019

omnibus order. But Shutt’s motion to dismiss remained, and so, therefore, did the 

PSLRA stay. 

The Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their claims against Sharma, Trapani, 

Farkas, and Zimmerman on June 5, 2019, leaving Centra Tech and Shutt as the 

sole remaining defendants. On June 7, the district court ordered the Plaintiffs to 

advise the court whether they intended to pursue their claims against Shutt and to 

file a motion for default judgment against Centra Tech by June 20. The Plaintiffs 

voluntarily dismissed their claims against Shutt on June 7, and the district court 

denied Shutt’s motion to dismiss as moot (also on June 7). At long last, no 

motions to dismiss remained pending, and the PSLRA discovery stay lifted once 

and for all. 

As ordered, the Plaintiffs moved for default judgment against Centra Tech 

on June 13, 2019. That same day, the Plaintiffs moved to certify three subclasses 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 7 of 25
8

of Centra Tech investors: those who had purchased Centra Tokens from Centra 

Tech during the ICO between July 23 and October 5, 2017; those who had done so 

between October 6, 2017 and April 20, 2018; and those who had purchased Centra 

Tokens on the open market. Centra Tech opposed the motion, claiming, among 

other things, that the named plaintiffs lacked standing and could not meet Federal 

Rule of Civil Procedure 23’s requirements for certification because they could not 

adequately represent the class and did not possess claims typical of the class 

members. It also argued that the Plaintiffs had waived their rights to bring a class 

action by signing agreements governing the sale of their Centra Tokens. Centra 

Tech, however, did not even suggest that the Plaintiffs’ motion for class 

certification should be denied because it was filed in an untimely manner. 

On September 16, 2019, the district court denied the motion to certify the 

three subclasses, offering two alternative grounds for its decision. First, the district 

court relied on Rule 23(c)(1)(A)’s requirement that a class be certified “at an early 

practicable time” to hold that the Plaintiffs’ certification motion -- filed eighteen

months after the initial complaint and six months after the amended complaint --

was untimely. The district court noted the absence of any excuse for the delay and 

concluded that the Plaintiffs had purposefully delayed until the certification motion 

“would be unopposed by a defaulting defendant.” 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 8 of 25
9

Second, the court determined that the proposed subclasses failed to meet 

Rule 23’s implicit ascertainability requirement because the Plaintiffs had not 

proposed an administratively feasible method of identifying absent class members. 

Plaintiffs’ reference to the existence of a Centra Tech spreadsheet listing ICO 

investor information did not suffice, the district court reasoned, because the 

spreadsheet covered only a subset of the members of the first proposed subclass. 

Moreover, the Plaintiffs did not actually have this spreadsheet; they relied on 

filings in the criminal and SEC actions describing it. The court added that the 

Plaintiffs’ reference to transaction information recorded by cryptocurrency 

exchanges was insufficient because the Plaintiffs had not explained to the court 

how such an identification process might work. 

The Plaintiffs tried again on October 1, 2019 with a renewed motion for 

class certification. This time, they devoted substantial argument to both timeliness 

and ascertainability. They explained that they had been waiting to move to certify

the class until the lifting of the PSLRA automatic discovery stay allowed them to 

conduct certification-related discovery. Regarding ascertainability, they proposed 

a new, narrowed class definition (all persons other than certain Centra Tech 

insiders who had purchased Centra Tokens as part of the ICO between July 23 and 

October 5, 2017), and provided an affidavit from an experienced claims 

administrator detailing a claims forms process for identifying class members. The 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 9 of 25
10

district court denied the renewed motion because, in its view, the Plaintiffs had not 

adduced “new evidence, changed circumstances, or new information about the 

class members’ claims” sufficient to justify a renewed motion. 

Meanwhile, the parties had been litigating the Plaintiffs’ court-ordered

motion for default judgment against Centra Tech, which the district court granted 

on December 13, 2019. The judgment ordered Centra Tech to pay damages to the 

named plaintiffs based on their Centra Token holdings, which ranged from $350.10 

in Rensel’s case to $2,672,864.54 for He. The district court denied Centra Tech’s 

motion for reconsideration on February 3, 2020. With judgment now final, the 

Plaintiffs timely appealed the interlocutory orders denying their initial and renewed 

motions for class certification. 

II.

By now, it is abundantly clear that the district courts enjoy wide latitude in 

deciding whether or not to certify a class, and our abuse-of-discretion review of 

class certification orders is accordingly deferential. See, e.g., Hines v. Widnall, 

334 F.3d 1253, 1257 (11th Cir. 2003). Even so, this deference is not absolute. We 

will reverse as an abuse of discretion a class certification order that represents a 

clear error of judgment, including because the district court followed improper 

procedures or applied the law in an unreasonable or incorrect manner. See Little v. 

T-Mobile USA, Inc., 691 F.3d 1302, 1305–06 (11th Cir. 2012). Here, both of the 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 10 of 25
11

district court’s alternative holdings denying the Plaintiffs’ initial motion for class 

certification -- on timeliness and ascertainability -- were abuses of discretion. We 

therefore vacate this order and remand for further proceedings.1

A.

District courts have broad discretion to control their dockets and surely may 

deny class certification motions as untimely, such as when unreasonable delay 

causes prejudice to the opposing party. See McCarthy v. Kleindienst, 741 F.2d 

1406, 1412 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (“[I]t was within the District Court’s broad discretion 

to rely upon the untimeliness of the class certification motion, and the unfavorable 

consequences caused by the delay, as grounds for denying certification.”). Under 

the circumstances of this case, however, the district court abused its considerable 

discretion in finding the Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification to be untimely. 

For just under fifteen of the eighteen months between the December 13, 2017 

filing of the initial complaint and the June 13, 2019 filing of the motion to certify, 

the PSLRA automatic stay rule prevented the Plaintiffs from conducting any 

discovery to support their motion for class certification.2

 The Plaintiffs, on the 

1 Accordingly, we do not address the propriety of the district court’s order denying the Plaintiffs’ 

renewed motion for class certification. 

2 Arguably, the PSLRA stay prevented the Plaintiffs even from filing a motion to certify without 

having first taken discovery. While some courts have interpreted the PSLRA stay of “all 

discovery and other proceedings” to cover only proceedings related to discovery, see Medhekar 

v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for the N. Dist. of California, 99 F.3d 325, 328 (9th Cir. 1996), others have 

interpreted “other proceedings” to include motions for class certification, see Winn v. Symons 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 11 of 25
12

facts of this case, were entitled to conduct some discovery before moving for class 

certification. We have observed that district courts will “often . . . need to go 

beyond the pleadings and permit some discovery and/or an evidentiary hearing to 

determine whether a class may be certified.” Mills v. Foremost Ins. Co., 511 F.3d 

1300, 1309 (11th Cir. 2008). It is not as if the district court considered this to be a 

case in which the propriety of certification was readily discernible from the 

pleadings. Indeed, it found that the class was not ascertainable precisely because 

the Plaintiffs had “failed to proffer any evidence that Centra Tech’s records would 

be useful to identify class members.” Given the chance, the Plaintiffs may have 

been able to obtain such evidence during class discovery. The PSLRA discovery 

stay did not permanently lift until June 7, 2019, just six days before the Plaintiffs 

filed their certification motion. 

With the stay in effect during the bulk of the action’s pendency, the 

Plaintiffs could not have moved for class certification any earlier than they did. 

Setting aside the swift six days it took the Plaintiffs to move after the denial of the 

final motion to dismiss (hardly a delay), the stay of all discovery applied except 

Int’l Grp., Inc., No. IP 00-0310-C-B/S, 2001 WL 278113, at *2 (S.D. Ind. Mar. 21, 2001). In an 

order confirming the PSLRA stay that came relatively late in the proceedings (on May 1, 2019), 

the district court in this case adopted a magistrate judge’s report interpreting the PSLRA stay to 

apply only to discovery-related proceedings. Our own Court has not directly addressed the scope 

of the PSLRA stay, and we need not and do not do so today. Even assuming that the narrower, 

discovery-only interpretation is correct, the operation of the PSLRA stay in this case effectively 

prevented the Plaintiffs from moving for class certification any earlier than they did. 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 12 of 25
13

during two short windows: (1) one month and twenty days between the filing of 

the initial complaint and the motion to dismiss that complaint, and (2) one month 

and twenty-seven days between the grant of leave to amend the complaint and the 

filing of the motion to dismiss the amended complaint. The Plaintiffs could not 

feasibly have moved for class certification during these periods. The amended 

complaint added new securities fraud claims, while the initial complaint alleged 

only the sale of unregistered securities. In fact, a certification motion based on the 

updated allegations, now including claims of material misrepresentations in 

violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, would have presented different 

issues than one based on the initial complaint. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a), (b)(3) 

(requiring analysis of, among other things, whether “there are questions of law or 

fact common to the class,” whether “the claims or defenses of the representative 

parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class,” and whether “questions 

of law or fact common to class members predominate over any questions affecting 

only individual members”). 

During both windows when the possibility of discovery briefly remained 

open, the Plaintiffs lacked even the benefit of the defendants’ answer, which would 

have informed a motion for class certification by responding to the factual 

allegations and specifying any affirmative defenses. See id. Moreover, these short 

windows did not provide sufficient time to take certification-related discovery. 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 13 of 25
14

Indeed, any certification motion brought during these early periods may well have 

been dismissed as premature. See, e.g., Lopez v. Glob. Credit & Collection Corp., 

No. 17 CV 427, 2017 WL 4340098, at *2 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 29, 2017) (“The motion 

for class certification is premature—no factual development has occurred, no 

answer is on file, and plaintiff is not in a position to meet his burden to prove the 

viability of a class action.”); Dickerson v. Lab’y Corp. of Am., Inc., No. 8:14-CV1390-T-30TBM, 2014 WL 12774194, at *1 (M.D. Fla. July 23, 2014) (certification 

motion was premature because it “was filed prior to a response from Defendant 

and prior to the commencement of discovery”); Hornsby v. McDonald’s USA, 

LLC, No. 8:14-CV-2288-T-30TBM, 2014 WL 12713358, at *1 (M.D. Fla. Oct. 7, 

2014) (same). 

Add to all of this that the Plaintiffs had no reason to believe they should 

have filed their class certification motion any earlier: the district court failed to set 

a deadline for filing the class certification motion. In response to the district 

court’s order, the parties timely filed a Rule 26(f) Joint Discovery Plan and 

Conference Report, but the district court did not enter a scheduling order. This 

omission was a violation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Local 

Rules for the Southern District of Florida. Fed. R. Civ. P. 16(b)(1)(A) (“[T]he 

district judge . . must issue a scheduling order . . . after receiving the parties’ report 

under Rule 26(f) . . . .”) (emphasis added); S.D. Fla. L.R. 16.1(b)(3) (providing, 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 14 of 25
15

with exceptions not relevant here, that “the Court shall enter a Scheduling Order as 

soon as practicable but in any event within sixty (60) days after the appearance of a 

defendant and within ninety (90) days after the complaint has been served on a 

defendant.”) (emphasis added). This deprived the Plaintiffs of any notice that their 

June 13, 2019 certification motion might be denied as untimely. There was no 

federal or local rule deadline for certification motions. The parties had every 

reason to believe that a June 2019 filing would be reasonable in this case; after all, 

the defendants’ proposed schedule contemplated a certification deadline of June 

14, 2019. And the district court said nothing to dispel this understanding.3

 See

William B. Rubenstein, 3 Newberg on Class Actions § 7:5 (5th ed. Dec. 2020 

Update) (hereinafter “Newberg”) (“[I]n most cases, the court will address the 

timing of class certification at the initial case management conference[, which] 

often results in a timetable agreed upon by all of the parties setting out the 

deadlines leading to the class certification decision.”). 

3 Given typical securities class action practices, it is not surprising that even the defendants 

thought an eighteen-month lapse between the initial complaint and filing a motion for class 

certification would be reasonable. In securities class actions filed between 2000 and 2018, the 

median time from the filing of the initial complaint to the class certification decision was twoand-a-half years. The time between the complaint and the certification decision was less than 

two years in only thirty percent of all cases and was less than one year in only four percent of 

cases. Stefan Boettrich & Svetlana Starykh, Recent Trends in Securities Class Action Litigation: 

2018 Full-Year Review (2019), 

https://www.nera.com/content/dam/nera/publications/2019/PUB_Year_End_Trends_012819_Fin

al.pdf. The Plaintiffs’ motion to certify simply did not come late. 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 15 of 25
16

Moreover, the parties’ understanding was reasonable in light of the general 

rules governing class action procedure. As we have explained, class action 

plaintiffs often require discovery to inform their class certification arguments, so it 

was perfectly reasonable for the Plaintiffs to believe they would not have to file 

their motion until some time after the lifting of the PSLRA discovery stay. Indeed, 

the defendants conditioned their suggested June 14, 2019 certification motion 

deadline on the expectation that the PSLRA discovery stay would lift by March 20. 

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(c)(1)(A) previously required district courts to 

make a certification determination “as soon as practicable”; in 2003, the Rule was 

amended to require the district court to make a certification decision “at an early 

practicable time.” 7AA Charles A. Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice & 

Procedure § 1785.3 (3d ed. Oct. 2020 Update). In part, this change sought to allow 

“more time for class discovery.” China Agritech, Inc. v. Resh, 138 S. Ct. 1800, 

1807 (2018) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Thus, the current 

version of Rule 23(c)(1)(A) not only supports the expectation that plaintiffs will 

have some opportunity for discovery before moving for class certification; it also 

places the onus of ensuring a timely certification decision on the district court, 

rather than on plaintiffs.4

 Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(c)(1)(A) (“At an early practicable 

4 The Southern District of Florida repealed its previous rule requiring class certification motions 

to be filed within 90 days of the complaint in order “to conform to the December 2003 

amendment to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(c)(1)(A), which clarifies that a Court may 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 16 of 25
17

time after a person sues or is sued as a class representative, the court must 

determine by order whether to certify the action as a class action.”).

To be sure, the Plaintiffs did not help themselves as much as they could 

have. They failed to mention the lack of any real opportunity for discovery in their 

certification motion or to move for limited relief from the PSLRA stay in order to 

conduct certification-related discovery, something they requested with respect to 

two other issues. But the district court was not without notice that the parties 

believed discovery was necessary to inform the class certification decision in this 

case. The joint Rule 26(f) report discussed the PSLRA stay and informed the court 

that discovery “would be significantly complicated by class certification issues,” 

including “hard-fought” disputes “related to proof of commonality and typicality.” 

Moreover, the Plaintiffs were not required to move for PSLRA stay relief in order 

to expedite the filing of a class certification motion; as we have discussed, it was 

not unreasonable for the Plaintiffs to simply wait for the PSLRA stay to expire 

before conducting class discovery and moving for certification. 

Yet the district court denied the Plaintiffs the chance to do this: on June 7, 

2019, the same day the PSLRA stay lifted upon the district court’s denial of the 

last remaining motion to dismiss, the court ordered the Plaintiffs to move for 

defer the decision on whether to certify a class if it is prudent to do so.” In re: Amendments to 

the Local Rules, Admin. Order 2011-11, at 54 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 29, 2011). 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 17 of 25
18

default judgment against Centra Tech and Shutt, the only remaining defendants in 

the case,5 by June 20. Thus, events forced the Plaintiffs’ class certification hand. 

If the district court entered final judgment against Centra Tech and disposed of the 

case before seeing a class certification motion, it would have deprived the

Plaintiffs of their ability to obtain class certification and to pursue class-wide 

damages. Therefore, they had to either move for class certification without any 

supporting discovery or forgo the opportunity to move for class certification at all. 

The Plaintiffs might have improved their lot by requesting relief from the order to 

move for default judgment or, again, by mentioning their difficult position in their 

certification brief. Even so, despite our Court having previously concluded that 

discovery is “often” necessary before a class certification decision, Mills, 511 F.3d 

at 1309, the district court effectively required the Plaintiffs to move for class 

certification before they had any real chance to take any class discovery. It then 

denied certification based in part on a lack of evidence of ascertainability, which 

the Plaintiffs might have been able to address with the aid of discovery. 

All of this might have been within the district court’s ample discretion if 

there were any sound reasons for finding the certification motion to be untimely 

even in the absence of a deadline, but there weren’t. See Newberg § 7:7 (in 

deciding whether to accept a late certification motion, courts consider “the 

5 Regarding Shutt, the Plaintiffs instead elected to dismiss their claims. 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 18 of 25
19

circumstances causing the delay” and “whether the opposing parties have been 

prejudiced by the delay”). The district court noted that the Plaintiffs filed their 

motion eighteen months after the initial complaint and had provided “no excuse or 

justification for this delay.” But as we have explained, considering the posture of 

this case, the eighteen-month lapse was not a “delay” that required any 

justification. More troubling, the district court stated that “the Plaintiffs’ delay 

appears to be a deliberate decision to file the motion when it would be unopposed 

by a defaulting defendant.” Yet the record belies this conclusion. The Clerk 

entered default against Centra Tech on January 31, 2019, so if the Plaintiffs were 

indeed playing a delay-until-default game, there was no reason for them to wait 

until June to file their certification motion. The district court did not mention any 

other way in which the timing might have prejudiced the defendant; nor has Centra 

Tech cited any. Indeed, Centra Tech did not so much as raise timeliness as a 

reason for denying the Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification when it filed its

response in opposition. Rather, Centra Tech argued that arbitration provisions

barred the action, that the named plaintiffs lacked standing and could not meet the 

substantive requirements of Rule 23, and no more. 

In short, the Plaintiffs could not practically have moved for class 

certification any earlier than they did. Effectively, they had no choice but to move 

prematurely. The Plaintiffs did not miss any class certification deadline, and their 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 19 of 25
20

timing did not prejudice any party. On this record, the district court’s denial of the 

Plaintiffs’ class certification motion as untimely was an abuse of discretion. 

B.

The district court’s alternative holding on the Plaintiffs’ initial motion for 

class certification, that the proposed class was not sufficiently ascertainable, was 

also an abuse of discretion. 

In their motion, the Plaintiffs proposed the following three subclasses: 

(1) All persons and entities who purchased CTR Tokens directly from

Defendant Centra Tech during Centra Tech’s official initial coin 

offering from approximately June 23, 2017 through October 5, 2017;

(2) All persons and entities who purchased CTR Tokens directly from

Defendant Centra Tech during the remainder of Centra Tech’s initial

coin offering from approximately October 6, 2017 through April 20,

2018; and

(3) All persons and entities who purchased CTR Tokens on the open

market as a result of Defendant Centra Tech successfully soliciting their 

purchases of CTR Tokens.

Relying on our unpublished decision in Karhu v. Vital Pharms., Inc., 621 F. App’x 

945, 947 (11th Cir. 2015), the district court reasoned that the Plaintiffs had to 

demonstrate an “administratively feasible” method of identifying class members 

that was “manageable” and did “not require much, if any, individual inquiry.” The 

court held that the Plaintiffs could not meet this requirement merely by referring to 

a spreadsheet “that was provided to the government in the criminal case [against 

the founders of Centra Tech] which provide[d] information regarding over 3,500 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 20 of 25
21

purchasers of Centra Tech Tokens.” The spreadsheet as described in the criminal 

complaint “would only partially cover one of the three subclasses” (the first ICO 

purchaser subclass), and there was no guarantee that the government would agree 

to share the spreadsheet with the Plaintiffs. Moreover, the district court reasoned 

that the “Plaintiffs [had] failed to proffer any evidence that [other Centra Tech] 

records would be useful to identify class members.” And their suggestion of 

drawing on information gleaned from currency exchanges did not help because 

“[t]he world of cryptocurrency and currency exchanges is a highly technical area 

and the Plaintiffs would need to explain to the Court how currency exchanges 

work, what information is stored, and how the Plaintiffs would access this 

information to identify potential class members.” 

The district court was right to inquire into whether the proposed subclasses 

were “adequately defined and clearly ascertainable” before it considered the 

express requirements of Rule 23(a). Cherry, 986 F.3d at 1302 (internal quotation 

marks omitted). But after the district court’s decision, we held in Cherry that 

“administrative feasibility is not a requirement for certification under Rule 23.” Id.

at 1304. In fact, the words “administrative feasibility” are nowhere to be found in 

Rule 23. Cherry thus clarified that “a proposed class is ascertainable if it is 

adequately defined such that its membership is capable of determination.” Id. at 

1304. While Rule 23 implicitly requires that class membership must be 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 21 of 25
22

ascertainable since a court cannot determine issues such as commonality or 

typicality if class membership is defined in vague terms, “membership can be 

capable of determination without being capable of convenient determination.” Id.

at 1303. Administrative feasibility may be relevant to “the manageability criterion 

of Rule 23(b)(3)(D),” but that provision requires a “comparative” analysis that is 

incompatible with a threshold, standalone administrative feasibility requirement. 

Id. at 1304. The court must weigh any manageability concerns against the 

advantages of proceeding as a class action. Id. at 1304–05. We thus rejected 

Karhu’s requirement that a Plaintiff explain to the district court exactly how the 

class members can be identified in a convenient manner. Id.

Plaintiffs’ proposed subclasses easily meet the Cherry standard for 

ascertainability. Membership in each of the subclasses turns on the objective, 

verifiable criterion of having purchased a particular security within a particular 

date range. The token purchaser spreadsheet identified many class members, and 

others could have been identified through additional Centra Tech ICO records or 

submission of claims forms verified by transaction records. Perhaps the third 

subclass, open market purchasers, would have presented some difficulty, but even 

so, the district court should have asked whether membership was “capable of 

determination” rather than rejecting the Plaintiffs’ arguments on this front simply 

because they had not explained precisely how they would access cryptocurrency 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 22 of 25
23

exchange information to identify class members. Since application of an incorrect 

legal standard is an abuse of discretion, id. at 1300, the district court’s application 

of the Karhu heightened ascertainability standard cannot stand. 

Neither of the district court’s reasons for denying the Plaintiffs’ initial 

motion for class certification withstands abuse-of-discretion review. Accordingly, 

we VACATE the district court’s order denying the initial motion for class 

certification and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. 

We also necessarily VACATE the final judgment.

6

 We do not disturb, however,

6 Even though the named plaintiffs have received a favorable judgment on their individual 

claims, there remains an ongoing controversy with respect to their asserted right to represent the 

interests of the proposed class. “Ordinarily, only a party aggrieved by a judgment or order of a 

district court may exercise the statutory right to appeal therefrom.” Deposit Guar. Nat. Bank v. 

Roper, 445 U.S. 326, 333 (1980). But this rule “does not have its source in the jurisdictional 

limitations of Art. III,” so, in certain circumstances, even a party who has prevailed on the merits 

in district court may appeal from an adverse collateral aspect of the judgment -- “so long as that 

party retains a stake in the appeal satisfying the requirements of Art. III.” Id. at 333–34. Thus, 

in Roper, the Supreme Court held that named plaintiffs could appeal a district court’s order 

denying class certification even though the district court had entered final judgment awarding 

them damages on their individual claims. The defendants had tendered these amounts and the 

district court had entered judgment even though the named plaintiffs objected. Id. at 330; see 

also Microsoft v. Baker, 137 S. Ct. 1702, 1711 (2017) (plaintiffs met with a denial of class 

certification may “litigate[] the case to final judgment and then appeal[]” the adverse 

certification decision.). 

Like in Roper, the district court’s judgment in this case awarding damages on the named 

plaintiffs’ individual claims did not grant them relief regarding their “continuing individual 

interest in the resolution of the class certification question.” 445 U.S. at 336. At the very least, 

the named plaintiffs in this case retain an “individual interest in the resolution of the class 

certification question in their desire to shift part of the costs of litigation to those who will share 

in its benefits if the class is certified and ultimately prevails.” See id.; see also Love v. 

Turlington, 733 F.2d 1562, 1565 (11th Cir. 1984) (“[A] class action plaintiff presents two 

separate issues for judicial resolution: the claim on the merits, and the claim that he is entitled to 

represent a class.”). This concrete interest saves this case from mootness and is sufficiently 

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 23 of 25
24

the district court decisions not before us on appeal, such as its determinations about

Centra Tech’s liability to the named plaintiffs. Roper, 445 U.S. at 336 (appellate 

jurisdiction in an appeal of an order denying class certification is limited to the 

certification issue and does not extend to “the merits of the substantive 

controversy”). Nor do we express any view on the propriety of class certification 

in this case other than with respect to the timeliness and ascertainability holdings in 

this opinion. 

related to the named plaintiffs’ “personal stake in the appeal” to confer federal appellate 

jurisdiction. Roper, 445 U.S. at 336, 340; see also Love, 733 F.2d at 1564–65 (named plaintiff’s 

settlement of her individual claim did not moot her appeal from a denial of class certification); 

Eisenberg v. Gagnon, 766 F.2d 770, 784–85 (3d Cir. 1985) (holding there was “no bar” to named 

plaintiffs’ appeal of a class certification denial even though they had obtained individual relief on 

the merits in the form of a default judgment against one defendant and trial victories over others, 

because “at a minimum” they retained an interest in shifting litigation costs if a class ultimately

prevailed), superseded by rule on other grounds as stated in Mielo v. Steak ‘n Shake Operations, 

Inc., 897 F.3d 467, 483 (3d Cir. 2018); cf. Hines, 334 F.3d at 1257 (“Although [the named 

plaintiffs] all settled individual claims . . . they still have standing to appeal the denial of 

certification because the settlement agreement preserved their right to appeal the class 

certification decision.”). Importantly, the named plaintiffs moved for default judgment against 

Centra Tech only because the district court ordered them to do so; they did not, for example, 

consent to a defendant’s offer of judgment and waive their right to appeal. See Shores v. Sklar, 

885 F.2d 760, 762–63 (11th Cir. 1989).

Thus, the district court’s judgment awarding damages on the named plaintiffs’ individual 

claims did not grant them relief regarding their claim that they are entitled to represent a class. 

In fact, the interlocutory orders denying class certification merged into the final judgment, see id.

at 763, so the final judgment resolved this claim against the named plaintiffs. Put another way, 

the final judgment did not give them, and in fact denied a portion of the “complete relief” they 

requested. See Radha Geismann, M.D., P.C. v. ZocDoc, Inc., 909 F.3d 534, 543 (2d Cir. 2018). 

The named plaintiffs may, therefore, obtain reversal of the portion of the district court’s 

judgment precluding them from representing the putative class and continue to pursue class 

certification (and, if successful, merits relief on behalf of the class).

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 24 of 25
25

VACATED AND REMANDED.

USCA11 Case: 20-10894 Date Filed: 06/29/2021 Page: 25 of 25