CoinDesk Editor-in-Chief Kevin Reynolds alerted me this week to a striking Linkedin post by a Coinbase (COIN) staffer. In the post, apparently now deleted, the Coinbaser wrote in part that it’s “crazy to me how much market value sits in these (probably) useless projects,” before listing a half-dozen tokens including dogecoin (DOGE), bitcoin cash (BCH), ethereum classic (ETC), shiba inu (SHIB), litecoin (LTC), bitcoin SV (BSV) and bitcoin gold (BTG).
Now, plenty of people would take issue with the idea that bitcoin cash, ethereum classic or even dogecoin are “useless.” But broadly, such sentiments wouldn’t sound out of place coming from any random account on Crypto Twitter.
The catch, of course, is that here they’re coming from a Coinbase staffer – and Coinbase makes money from the trading of “useless” bitcoin cash, ethereum classic, dogecoin, shiba inu, and Litecoin.
To be clear, I think it reflects both good morals and good strategy that Coinbase staffers are opinionated on social media. In this industry, it’s a crucial way to keep up to date and test ideas. Employees putting their critical thinking skills on display is also good branding.
But the post raised a much larger point: Do crypto exchanges like Coinbase have a responsibility to customers when they choose what tokens they offer for sale? Should exchanges warn customers about projects or tokens regarded as questionable by their own staff? Or is an exchange’s role more neutral, simply listing tokens and letting customers make their own choices?
That’s a particularly pressing question in the wake of the collapse of the Luna ecosystem with the depegging of the terraUSD (UST) stablecoin. There have been unsubstantiated Twitter rumors of a class action lawsuit that would target exchanges that sold the LUNA or UST tokens. That group includes many centralized custodial exchanges around the world and several in the U.S., including Kraken, Binance US, and Gemini.
Coinbase didn’t sell LUNA directly, but did offer the UST stablecoin as well as “wrapped LUNA” (wLUNA) bridged to Ethereum (for, I’m sure, perfectly sound reasons). Very much to its credit, Coinbase also does not offer trading in bitcoin SV, bitcoin gold, or dogelon mars (ELON), the other tokens the Coinbase staffer called out.
You might not think it makes much sense to sue an exchange for selling you a token that collapses – as I’ll say once more for those in the back, any cryptocurrency at all is a hugely speculative investment, and this could all go to zero tomorrow. But exchanges spent much of the past two years making Super Bowl ads promising that crypto is the future, so you can at least empathize with someone who feels ripped off.
You might expect there to be a bright-line legal or regulatory answer to this question, but it’s actually somewhat unclear. That’s partly because many of the crypto assets Coinbase offers are in a gray zone relative to securities law. So a lot of the rules regarding the responsibilities of financial intermediaries for stocks, for instance, wouldn’t straightforwardly apply to an entity performing the same role for crypto-assets.
Read the full story here: We Need to Talk About Exchanges That Sell You Coins Like UST
