(Reuters) -Bloomberg News said on Monday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into whether Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) Global Inc. did anything wrong by letting Americans trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities.
In an email to Reuters, a spokesperson for Coinbase said that the company does not list securities on its platform. Its legal head, Paul Grewal, also said that the company was looking forward to talking to the SEC about the issue.
“We’re sure that our thorough due diligence process, which the SEC has already looked at, keeps securities off of our platform,” Grewal said.
Two sources were cited in a Bloomberg report that said the SEC’s attention has grown since the crypto trading platform increased the number of tokens it lets people trade. (https://bloom.bg/3OyXrBk)
When Reuters asked the U.S. securities regulator for a comment on the report, they did not answer.
The SEC’s enforcement unit has been looking into this since before the alleged insider trading scheme that came to light last week.
In the first case of insider trading involving cryptocurrency, U.S. prosecutors charged Ishan Wahi, a former product manager at Coinbase, with sharing confidential information about upcoming announcements of new cryptocurrency assets that Coinbase users would be able to trade through its exchange.
In related civil charges, the SEC said that Wahi’s brother Nikhil Wahi and their friend Sameer Ramani bought and sold at least 25 crypto assets for a profit, nine of which the agency said were securities.
At the time, the SEC would not say whether it would take action against Coinbase for listing the tokens that the complaint said were securities.
Before, the cryptocurrency platform asked the SEC to make rules for digital asset securities that work.
