Coinbase has been in the news, for legal reasons, over the past few days. Just last week the crypto exchange’s ex-product manageLastWahi was arrested. According to Bloomberg, Wahi allegedly disclosed confidential token listing information on Coinbase and provided illicit trading advice to his brother and a friend.
Read More: US Authorities Detain Former Coinbase Employee For Insider Trading
Back then, Bloomberg’s sources had asserted, “the exchange operator wasn’t a focus of the probe and won’t face charges.” However now, in what is the latest development, Coinbase is under the SEC’s radar over cryptocurrency listings.
Coinbase “improperly” permitted Americans to trade?
Per Bloomberg’s Ally Versprille,
“The probe by the SEC’s enforcement unit predates the agency’s investigation into an alleged insider trading scheme that led the regulator last week to sue a former Coinbase manager and two other people.”
Bloomberg revealed that via the probe, the regulatory agency is investigating early” permitted the regulatory agency d Americans to trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities.
In an emailed response to Reuters, a Coinbase spokesperson said that the company does not list securities on its platform, adding,
“We think there’s a huge untapped market and the U.S. risks falling behind if the SEC doesn’t engage in a transparent and public rulemaking process for digital asset securities.”
Well, Coinbase has time and again overtly asked the SEC to provide clarity and develop rules with respect to digital asset securities.
Citing two sources, Bloomberg’s report added that the regulatory scrutiny of Coinbase has increased ever since the platform expanded the number of tokens in which it offers trading. Despite the exchange being in a fix, it has announced the listing on the Chinese oracle project NEST under the experimental label. The project, as such, is deemed to be shady, with Chinese journalist Colin Wu tweeting that it has “bad reputation” and has nearly disappeared since it rose to popularity in 2020.
Alongside, two other tokens—Celer Network and Stargate Finance—are included in Coinbase’s latest listing plan. In terms of market capitalization, the said tokens were ranked #163 and #356 on Coinbase at press time.