Suit Against Coinbase Is Heading to the Supreme Court

A crypto-centered lawsuit with popular digital currency exchange Coinbase as the defendant is heading to the Supreme Court. This marks the first time such a high-ranking court in the U.S. has ever considered such a case.

The Supreme Court Is Examining a Coinbase Suit

The plaintiff is a man who was, at one point, a customer of Coinbase. It’s alleged the man gave a scammer (who was pretending to be a representative of PayPal) remote access to his Coinbase account. This cost him more than $30K. He has now filed suit against the digital trading platform, claiming the company’s security measures were not what they could have been.

Coinbase is asking the Supreme Court to butt out. It says such issues should only be handled through arbitration. Right now, it appears the Supreme Court is heavily divided on the issue, and no answer as to whether the Justices will go forward has been provided at the time of writing. However, the case certainly marks a precedent for the digital currency arena in many ways, and it’s become clear that the U.S. has never taken digital assets as seriously as it is doing now.

Ever since the collapse of FTX, the once famed digital currency trading enterprise based in the Bahamas, many politicians and regulators throughout the country have called for heightened crypto supervision as they supposedly don’t want similar problems occurring in the future. This would all be fine and dandy except for one thing… Many of the politicians that are calling for said regulation have benefited greatly from FTX.

People like Joe Biden and several democrat office holders received heavy donations from the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried, the man behind FTX. These donations likely came in the form of stolen customer funds, which were also used to pay off loans for another company (Alameda Research) and invest in luxury Bahamian real estate. This has gotten SBF into loads of trouble, and he’s now on the verge of going to trial for fraud charges.

All this and more puts something of a dark cloud over crypto regulation in the U.S., so while it’s certainly a positive thing that the Supreme Court would be willing to look at a case like this, it does cast a bit of a pall over the industry in that those in charge as of late haven’t taken on the forms of the “cleanest” or most honest people, so how much do traders really want members of the U.S. government interfering in the crypto arena, especially when it was designed to be autonomous?

Don’t Let the Data Out!

Regarding the case, Coinbase lawyer Neal Katyal explained:

If [the plaintiffs] try and force discovery in the district court, and then they get access to discovery, which may have embarrassing details, it could spill out into the newspapers.

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