In short
- Hackers paid Rogue Coinbase employees of customer service to leak sensitive customer information.
- The SEC is investigating whether Coinbase has blown up user numbers in previous disclosures.
- The Fallout comes only a few days after the company was affiliated with the S&P 500 Index.
Coinbase is confronted with a tough week on several fronts, only a few days after he became the first crypto-native company participate The S&P 500 index.
On Thursday, the biggest crypto exchange of the US made public It had a data breach with Insider collusion and an attempt at Bitcoin Chart of $ 20 million on 11 May.
In a video posted Online revealed CEO Brian Armstrong that overseas supporting agents had accepted bribes of criminals to leak sensitive user data, including names, addresses, partial bank details and ID documents. Less than 1% of customers were hit, Coinbase said.
The company also said that it refused to pay the ransom and now offers a premium of $ 20 million for information about the responsible person.
The infringement has received a sharp criticism of how much of the infrastructure in Crypto is still dependent on centralized, opaque systems that, according to Phil Mataras, founder of Arweave-based permanent cloud network AR.io, the vulnerabilities of Web2 replicates.
“When access and trust in one organization are concentrated, a single error or insider threat can jeopardize millions,” he said Decrypt.
“Systems must minimize dependence on trust -based mechanisms by distributing control as a standard, making operations transparent and ensuring that critical data cannot be changed or lost,” he added.
Sec call
As an addition to the misery of the company, the same day raised new revelations that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Coinbase misled investors by exaggerating the number of users in earlier archives.
The probe, first reported Through The New York Timesrevolves around Coinbase’s claim in his IPO materials from 2021 that it had more than 100 million “verified users”, a figure that the company continued to enter into marketing until 2022.
Coinbase has since retired the statistics and says in a submission of 2023 that it was not a reliable indicator for performance.
The company noted that some users may have made multiple accounts and that the stat has included everyone who has verified an e -mail or telephone number.
Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal described the probe as a “holdover” of the earlier administration.
“Although we are strongly convinced that this research should not continue, we remain dedicated to work with the SEC to end this issue,” he added.
The renewed check comes shortly after the sec drop A lawsuit that accuses Coinbase of illegal token sale, which indicates a thaw in the hostility of the regulations under a more crypto-friendly SEC chairman and government administration.
Coinbase repeatedly spar With the previous SEC administration under Gary Gensler, the approach to digital assets criticized as an inconsistent and overly aggressive.
The exchange has also been investigated Because of the SEC about how the USDC income and his relationship with the issuer of the Stablecoin, Circle, generates, a matter that Grewal said in a statement in a statement in April.
The same month, the state of Oregon too submitted A lawsuit against Coinbase, which claims that the stock market has violated the state legislation.
What the experts think
Yet experts say that the probe may not have a equipment on the long -term process of Coinbase. “Many companies have confronted similar cases such as these and lived to fight another day,” says Nick Cote, co-founder and CEO of Secondlane.
He compared the situation with the $ 100 million pen finish from Facebook in 2019 and the class scheme of Twitter $ 800 million in 2024.
Legal expert Jack Graves, a professor of law at Syracuse University, is of the opinion that the S&P 500 of Coinbase would probably not have taken place if the SEC probe were serious threats.
“I think the data breach is more important, especially if you are considering the history of this industry,” he said. “However, if the SEC examination is more than is presented here, I can change your mind.”
Other crypto insiders were still negative.
Peter Chung from Presto Labs called The Times Report a “hit piece”, telling Decrypt That crypto is a new industry and that is why the best practice about what a reliable statistics for crypto exchange users is not firmly established.
“It seems that Coinbase has voluntarily changed the reported metric after he realizes that the initial figure is misleading, he said.” This is not enough to claim that they acted faithfully and earn to be punished by the market. “
Coinbase claims that the metric in question was fully announced and in the right way has been contextualized in its archives, and that it moved the focus to more meaningful indicators such as monthly transactions that start in 2023.
The company characterized the probe to Decrypt As an inheritance of the previous SEC administration and said it will continue to work with supervisors.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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