SEC urges court to reject Coinbase’s subpoena request for documents

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has requested a New York court to deny Coinbase’s subpoena to compel the agency to provide documents related to crypto assets, which the agency described as encompassing “essentially all documents that in any way relate to crypto assets.”

The SEC’s court document on Monday claimed that the agency had been accommodating Coinbase’s requests to disclose additional documents, including fair notice and documents from investigative files outside of the Coinbase case. 

“Unsatisfied, Coinbase continued to press the SEC to conduct a sprawling search of all agency records—including all internal files and all communications with government agencies and market participants,” wrote the SEC, which added that Coinbase failed to cite any former cases or legal principle to support its “extraordinary” requests.

The SEC summed up that Coinbase sought “entirely irrelevant” documents on a weak basis that they could supposedly relate to Coinbase’s services or the application of securities laws to digital assets.

“If the SEC is going to engage in an unprecedented regulation by enforcement campaign, the least they owe to those they target – and the public – is transparency,” Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer, commented on X in response to the SEC’s court document.

Coinbase had previously requested the court to issue a subpoena to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, seeking a search of Gensler’s personal emails as a source of discovery, according to the court document. U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of New York had rejected the request.

Last year, the agency sued Coinbase for operating as an unregistered securities exchange. The core of the dispute lies in the SEC’s assertion that many cryptocurrencies offered on Coinbase are actually securities, subject to their regulations. Coinbase disagrees, arguing that most cryptocurrencies are digital commodities and not securities.