Is This The First ‘Evidence’ Of Insider Trading At Coinbase?

Last week, in “Raise Your Hand If You Traded Bitcoin And Bitcoin Cash On Inside Information In The Last 48 Hours,” we documented the rather suspicious price action leading up to Coinbase’s Tuesday evening announcement about bitcoin cash.

Specifically, Bitcoin took an abrupt dive right around the close on Wall Street. A little over three hours later, when the official announcement was made about bitcoin cash adoption by Coinbase, Bitcoin plunged:

Prior to that, bitcoin cash had been rising. It exploded higher when Coinbase made things official:

And the ensuing chaos led to multiple halts:

Update on #BCH trading on GDAXhttps://t.co/p3cEx0ryh7 pic.twitter.com/NyGUTVFL91

— Coinbase Exchange ?? (@CoinbaseExch) December 20, 2017

On Wednesday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the following in a blog post:

Today we announced support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH). It appears the price of Bitcoin Cash on other exchanges increased in the hours before our announcement.

We’ve had a trading policy in place for some time at Coinbase. The policy prohibits employees and contractors from trading on “material non-public information”, such as when a new asset will be added to our platform. In addition to trading restrictions, it prohibits communication of material non-public information outside the company. This includes to friends and family.

Our launch of Bitcoin Cash today is no exception to this. All Coinbase employees and contractors were explicitly prohibited from trading Bitcoin Cash and from disclosing our launch plans over a month ago. This was communicated multiple times via multiple channels to employees. For instance, I made sure it was emphasized at our Friday Q&A sessions, and in emails sent to all employees. I view it as a key part of my job to set the tone from the top about how we all must act to ensure success. The trading restriction, which applies to all personal trading activity on any platform, remains in effect now.

I take the confidentiality of material non-public information very seriously as CEO. Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter. If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies – directly or indirectly – I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action.

Prompting us to say the following:

That would certainly seem to suggest that employees have known about the impending launch for weeks (at least). It seems entirely reasonable to posit that some of those employees either leaked the information, traded at arm’s length through someone else’s accounts, or both.

Well fast forward to Monday, and Albert Renshaw thinks he’s got some “evidence” of these shenanigans and he shared that “evidence” with Forbes contributor John Koetsier.

At issue is this archived Reddit exchange:

Apparently, that exchange was archived on the 20th, so the “2 days ago” time stamp would refer to the 18th, a day ahead of the actual Coinbase bitcoin cash announcement.

We’re not even going to begin to speculate on the veracity of any of this, and fortunately we don’t have to because the Forbes contributor mentioned above did it for us and you can check out the entire piece here.

The bottom line from where we’re sitting is not “who is mukiwa2?” because you know, who the fuck cares, right?

The issue, rather, is precisely what we said it was in our initial post linked here at the outset. Namely this:

Sure, someone over at Coinbase might be fired, but the bottom line is that without proper (i.e. formal) regulation, there is no way to ensure that this kind of thing won’t continue to happen. Formal regulation obviously doesn’t stop people from trading on inside information and if we’ve learned anything over the past 10 years it’s that regulation doesn’t stop cartels of traders from manipulating pretty much everything. Further, regulatory capture and the government’s unwillingness to treat white collar criminals the same way they treat other criminals ensures that with the possible exception of a few scapegoats, no one will ever go to prison.

All of that said, it wouldn’t hurt to have these exchanges properly regulated because while the threat of punishment for insider trading and other white collar crimes may indeed be something of a paper tiger, it’s at least more intimidating than some ridiculous internal review like what Coinbase is proposing above.