Coinbase reached a Freedom of Information Act settlement with the SEC on July 22, forcing the regulator to pay $150,000 and overhaul its internal record-retention practices.
Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said the lawsuit originally sought communications among senior SEC officials, including former Chair Gary Gensler, from the period when the agency was actively pursuing enforcement actions against crypto firms. The SEC admitted that text messages between Gensler and other officials had been erased by an automated system, covering the window from April 2021 to January 2025. Grewal was blunt about the irony: the same regulator that has handed out billions in fines to financial institutions for record-keeping failures lost its own records and blamed a glitch. "The SEC's excuse rings hollow," he wrote.
FDIC documents and Operation Choke Point 2.0
This is the second FOIA win Coinbase has logged in 2026. Earlier this year the company forced the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to release documents showing that the FDIC had quietly told roughly two dozen banks to pause cryptocurrency-related activity, a coordinated effort critics labeled "Operation Choke Point 2.0." The FDIC had publicly denied any such campaign in 2023. The released documents triggered congressional hearings.
Grewal framed both cases as bigger than crypto. "Americans have a right to know when their government oversteps or rigs rules in secret," he wrote. The SEC separately dropped its enforcement lawsuit against Coinbase, a case that dated back to the Biden administration, while Congress has passed stablecoin legislation the company strongly backed.
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