Coinbase, the cryptocurrency and trading exchange, has filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The company is pursuing transparency behind the decisions made by financial regulators in the United States. Regulations installed by entities like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have been scrutinized by the leading lights in the crypto world in 2023 and 2024.
Coinbase has been involved in the SEC’s major crackdown on companies trading in crypto over the past two years. In 2023, the SEC charged Coinbase with operating a crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla presided, saying, “The Court finds the SEC has sufficiently pleaded that Coinbase operates as an exchange, as a broker, and as a clearing agency under the federal securities laws, and, through its Staking Program, engages in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.
The crypto company hit back with its countersuit, challenging the SEC in a June court case for failing to comply with an existing FOIA request for public disclosures.
Coinbase fires back FOIA to get answers behind crypto regulations
Paul Grewal, a former US Magistrate Judge is now Coinbase’s acting legal specialist, and he took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to announce the FOIA actions:
We filed two new sets of FOIA requests in our continued effort to get any sort of clarity on how regulatory agencies are approaching digital assets. In short, so long as the government will not relent, neither will @coinbase. 1/3
— paulgrewal.eth (@iampaulgrewal) October 21, 2024
He continues the post on X in three parts: “The first (FOIA) is for documents about a digital asset deposit cap @FDICgov and other banking regulators have apparently been imposing on financial institutions. The second is for logs that show how these agencies are handling other FOIA requests. Each is separate from our FOIA filings from over a year ago that are now the subject of federal lawsuits.”
In March of this year, the SEC scored a major victory over Grewal and Coinbase by winning the argument that the company knowingly traded in 13 digital tokens that should have been registered as securities but were not.
Coinbase contends that this was unnecessary, but as part of Grewal’s X posts, they have launched their counter-offensive to get to the bottom of financial regulators and their decisions to crack down on crypto companies.
Grewal concluded, “You can read our filings related to the apparent 15% digital asset deposit cap here. Our filings related to FOIA logs are here.”
In September of this year (2024), Grewal said, “@SECgov refuses to provide a reasonable explanation for its barebones denial, yet it has wielded its purported authority to engage in an arbitrary enforcement campaign against our industry. Coinbase is determined to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to get clarity for our industry and the millions of Americans who hold crypto.”
Image: Pixlr.
