Coinbase Chasing Receipts at SEC to Tally Cost of Agency's Crypto Saga

As the smoke clears on its own newly dropped enforcement case, Coinbase is demanding the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cough up a record of its spending on investigations and actions against the wider industry in recent years

The biggest U.S. crypto exchange is filing a Freedom of Information Act request — using its contractor History Associates Inc. — to obtain internal agency accounting for the expense of its enforcement campaign involving digital assets businesses. The document seeks total costs for investigations and enforcement actions in the past four years; a listing of targeted companies; the numbers of employees and contractors working on the cases; and financial information about the running of the previous leadership's crypto enforcement unit.

The SEC has been under new management since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who elevated Commissioner Mark Uyeda to be acting chairman. Uyeda began a dramatic reversal of the agency's crypto stance, replacing legal officials, snuffing out investigations and dismissing long-running court cases, including the one against Coinbase.

"We're asking the SEC to produce this information voluntarily and subject to their FOIA obligations, without making Coinbase or anybody else have to go to court to get what we think the American people deserve to know," said Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, in an interview with CoinDesk.

Coinbase has pursued the SEC in federal court before on public-records disputes, and the company's effort to reveal communications about the regulator's internal discussions on crypto oversight is still an active case.

Even as the agency has freed digital assets businesses from enforcement cases, some in the industry have called for the SEC to pay more harshly for the way it handled the sector under Chair Gary Gensler, including requests to fire more staff who were involved. Grewal insisted that this records request isn't retaliatory but that transparency about what happened is necessary.

"This is not just about Coinbase or anybody else taking a victory lap or trying to rub the SEC or anybody else's nose in their admission that the last four years were a mistake," he said. "This is much more about learning the lessons of history so that we never have to repeat them."

While the public has a right to view government documents, the process for obtaining them often runs into agency roadblocks and can stretch into months or years. And the SEC can cite exceptions that include cases remaining active, which still includes a number of crypto matters involving such firms as Kraken, Ripple and Crypto.com. But Grewal said closed cases such as Coinbase's and the many other firms getting good news in recent days should be available to scrutiny.

"Let's get the facts on the table," Grewal said. "Let's tally up what the costs were. Let's consider whether there were some benefits that ought to be measured as well. And then let's decide, is this what we want for our country and for our economy, and how do we craft rules to make sure that this doesn't happen again?"

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