The Curious Case of Insider Trading at Coinbase
On April 11, Coinbase’s blog published a post titled “Increasing Transparency for new asset listings on Coinbase”. While I’m not privy to internal machinations at Coinbase, I can say this is generally the kind of public relations work corporate entities often post to acknowledge impact of questionable policy without actually admitting guilt. Think of it as a “we’ll do better, so let’s just put this messy business behind us, ok?”
Breaking down the post, they list a number of newly issued, relatively illiquid coins and tokens. There’s also a definition of asset types eligible for Coinbase listing:
- Native assets on their own network (examples include MINA and STX)
- ERC-20 tokens (examples include APE and GALA)
- SPL tokens (examples include ORCA and FIDA)
None of which addresses some of the social media activity which promoted the post. A number of observers noted buyers who were able to purchase assets pre listing, at significant discounts. As a result of this coming to light, we expect more calls for regulation. I think it’s important I take a moment to spell out FlourishingAI policy clearly: early discount purchases not widely available to the entire community is counter to our mission of democratizing crypto at FlourishingAI.
I’ll present some of the social activity below, without further comment.
