Bitcoin Magazine

Coinbase Settles FOIA Fight With the SEC Over Gensler’s Vanished Texts

Coinbase has settled its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission, closing a years-long fight that came to rest on a batch of text messages the agency admits it destroyed. 

Chief legal officer Paul Grewal disclosed the deal in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.

Under the terms, Grewal wrote, the SEC will pay $150,000 and repair its record-retention policies. 

The story behind the settlement is what gives it weight. Coinbase filed FOIA requests in 2023 for records that might show how the SEC decided to treat crypto as securities, the same question at the center of the enforcement suit the agency brought against the company that June. 

Rather than hand over the files, the SEC denied the requests, and the case dragged into court.

The SEC’s own inspector general found that close to a year of former Chair Gary Gensler’s text messages, from October 2022 to September 2023, had been wiped after the agency reset his phone before a backup was made. 

That window covered the collapse of FTX and the agency’s hardest push against crypto exchanges. The watchdog found that 38% of the recovered texts touched agency business, including a May 2023 exchange on the timing of enforcement against trading platforms.

SEC should play by the same rules: Coinbase

Grewal built his case on a point that needs no legal training to feel. Under Gensler, the SEC had levied more than $1 billion in fines on financial firms for losing employee messages, and had said “everybody should play by the same rules.” 

Yet it lost its own chair’s texts during the most consequential stretch in crypto’s short history. “The Gensler SEC destroyed documents they were required to preserve and produce,” Grewal wrote when the report landed. “We now have proof from the SEC’s own Inspector General.”

For Coinbase, the value was never the documents alone. The company had cast its transparency suits, including a challenge to the SEC and FDIC over pressure on crypto’s banking access, as proof that regulators leaned on the industry without clear rules. The SEC’s own case against Coinbase fell away in early 2025 under a new administration and a new chair.

The settlement doubles as a personal coda. Grewal, the lawyer who steered Coinbase through years of combat with the SEC, plans to leave the company at the end of July. 

He closes this chapter with a small check, a promise of better filing habits, and a story the industry will carry for a long time: that the recordkeeping enforcer could not keep its own records.

This post Coinbase Settles FOIA Fight With the SEC Over Gensler’s Vanished Texts first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinbase Wants To Be Canada’s ‘Everything Exchange’ — With Crypto, Stocks, and Prediction Markets

Crypto giant Coinbase is making its “everything exchange” push in Canada. 

Eric Richmond, country director and CEO of Coinbase Canada, told BNN Bloomberg in a Tuesday interview that the move would allow Canadians to not only buy crypto but also trade tokenized stocks and put money on prediction markets. 

“Coinbase believes we have a new technology here that can really help with that, and that’s blockchain and the technology that underpins crypto today,” Richmond said in the interview. “How do we create that one place for Canadians to have their entire financial experience in one app that’s underpinned by this technology that makes things frictionless, seamless, and 24/7?”

He added: “I think people are starting to realize the fact that banks close at 4 p.m., or the markets close at 4 p.m., or that wires can take days to settle, or that access for high-net-worth individuals to certain products are gated for just those high-net-worth individuals.”

Coinbase in the U.S. allows Americans to place bets and trade stocks. The company started as a place allowing people to buy and sell Bitcoin but has since offered hundreds of digital coins. 

Richmond added that the company was working with Canadian regulators to make the launch. 

Tokenized stocks are versions of equities that trade on the technology underpinning Bitcoin: the blockchain. Proponents like Coinbase argue that by tokenizing everything, traders will be able to make transactions around the clock, 24-7. 

A number of crypto exchanges are also making the push to branch out from crypto: Kraken, for example, has also started allowing users to trade stocks and has announced plans for a prediction market platform. 

Coinbase’s big moves 

Coinbase has made some bigger moves in recent years, other than just working as a crypto exchange. 

America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, last year signed a deal with the company to allow customers to directly link their bank accounts to the platform. 

Coinbase also provides custody services — including to Wall Street giants like BlackRock — and has a contract with the US government to hold onto seized crypto.

The company also in April received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. for a national trust banking charter, essentially paving the way for it to serve as a crypto custodian on a federal basis, managing assets for larger entities.

The company has clashed with banking executives recently over stablecoin rewards: the exchange wants its yield-bearing stablecoin products to continue, which in turn could prove to be a bigger boon in the long-run for the business.

This post Coinbase Wants To Be Canada’s ‘Everything Exchange’ — With Crypto, Stocks, and Prediction Markets first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinbase Executive Says Clarity Act Has ‘Tremendous Momentum’ in the Senate

Coinbase Vice Chair Ryan VanGrack said the Clarity Act has gained “tremendous momentum” in the Senate, in a CNBC “Squawk Box” appearance that made the case for a federal crypto framework and touched on bitcoin, blockchain, and the industry’s uneasy truce with Wall Street.

VanGrack, a former SEC official, framed the Clarity Act as an overdue set of rules rather than a giveaway. “It’s not about no regulation,” he said. “This is about imposing regulation on the industry for the first time.” He described a “win-win-win” for American investors, innovators, and standards should the measure pass, and said a bipartisan group of senators has kept up work “even in the last few weeks and days.”

Clarity Act updates

The House passed its version of the Clarity Act last year, and attention has shifted to the Senate, where the path to 60 votes remains the central hurdle. 

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill in a 15-9 vote this spring, with two Democrats crossing over, and House members have urged the Senate to act before the August recess. The measure sits in a narrow window as negotiators work out remaining terms.

President Trump added his voice last week, posting on Truth Social in support of Senator Lindsey Graham and calling on the Senate to pass the bill. Trump framed the stakes in terms of competition with China, a message he has repeated as he presses the chamber to move.

VanGrack said Democrats have won concessions that strengthen the bill’s consumer protections. 

JUST IN: Coinbase Vice Chair talks CLARITY ACT on CNBC

"The Democrats have obtained meaningful concessions to make what was already a strong consumer protection bill, THAT much stronger" pic.twitter.com/y3n04dKdRi

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 20, 2026

He pointed to an illicit-finance framework, an “FTX loophole” that the text would close, insider-trading safeguards, and added disclosures. 

“Across the board, the Democrats have obtained meaningful concessions to make what was already a strong consumer protection bill that much stronger,” he said. 

He said the bill would not change how crypto is classified as a commodity or a security in a fundamental sense, and would preserve the registration, examination, and surveillance structure from the House version.

Asked how the industry reconciles with skeptics like JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, VanGrack pointed to a wave of bank and institutional deals. 

“Not a week goes by,” he said, where a firm fails to announce a new crypto project or investment. He predicted an “inevitable convergence,” a point at which the market stops separating traditional finance from crypto and treats each as a modern financial institution.

That convergence has played out in public, and in conflict. JPMorgan and Coinbase announced a partnership to widen crypto access, and the bank has moved to accept bitcoin as loan collateral and to let clients trade it. 

Dimon, for his part, has declared war on the Clarity Act and aimed a crude insult at Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, a reminder that the détente carries friction.

Is bitcoin real? 

The interview turned to a sharper question from CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin: whether blockchain is real but bitcoin is not. VanGrack called it “a fair question” and said the technology’s benefits stand on their own — faster settlement, more transparency, and round-the-clock transactions. 

He argued that no one building a financial system today would recreate the infrastructure of the past century. He cited Citadel Securities, which he said made another large investment in the crypto economy last week, as a sign that major institutions are trending the same course.

Sorkin pressed the harder edge of the design: the technology aims to remove the counterparty a customer might call when something goes wrong. VanGrack conceded the point as fair, then countered with the costs of the current system — days to reconcile trades and the counterparty risk that delay creates. 

“I’m not here to tell you it’s the wrong technology,” he said. He acknowledged open questions, including whether crypto accounts should carry interest or loyalty rewards, a debate that bankers have raised and that the law will settle as “a blunt instrument.”

He closed on the case for Clarity Act passage. “In the absence of clarity, you do not have a federal oversight and framework,” he said. “So whether you love crypto or hate crypto, you should want” the Clarity Act.

This post Coinbase Executive Says Clarity Act Has ‘Tremendous Momentum’ in the Senate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.