Just days after the leading U.S. crypto exchange admonished the SEC for inserting itself into an ongoing case of insider trading prosecuted under wire fraud, the company appears to find itself the subject of an investigation by Gary Gensler’s powerful agency. Citing three people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported that the SEC is looking into whether Coinbase improperly allowed Americans to trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities, once again drawing attention to the legal gray area under which crypto falls. “We are confident that our rigorous diligence process—a process the SEC has already reviewed—keeps securities off our platform,” posted Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, late on Monday in response to the story. He included a link to his blog post from Friday arguing that Coinbase does not list securities: “End of Story”. If assets traded on Coinbase are found to fit the legal definition for securities, then Coinbase would need to register as an exchange with the SEC. Potentially it would mark the second time the SEC may be launching a probe into a crypto platform, since it allegedly is investigating whether Coinbase rival Binance should have registered its native token marketed under the ticker symbol BNB as a security.
Full story : Coinbase under investigation after outburst against SEC.
