Coinbase Got Over 1800 Law Enforcement Info Requests In 2020

Coinbase got over 1800 law enforcement information requests in the first half of the year largely in the form of subpoenas as the company announced in a new transparency report so let’s read more in our latest Coinbase news.

The San Francisco-based crypto exchange released the information in the first transparency report ever and the digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation initially requested that the exchange should be more transparent in how it handles authorities’ requests for users’ private data regarding their finances. In addition to the criminal information requests, Coinbase got over 1800 law enforcement information requests of civil or administrative requests.

As part of our commitment to being the most trusted venue to interact with cryptocurrency, we are releasing our first Transparency Report. The report summarizes government requests that we received for customer account info during the first half of 2020. https://t.co/GCjueNlzZy

— Coinbase (@coinbase) October 16, 2020

More than 1100 of the requests came from agencies in the United States and about 441 came from the United Kingdom. Most of the requests came from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the company wrote in a blog post:

 “As a financial institution with a duty to detect and prevent prohibited activity on its platform, we respect the legitimate interests of government authorities in pursuing bad actors who abuse others and our platform. Yet we do not hesitate to push back where appropriate, even when it is inconvenient or costly to do so. That’s why each request we receive is handled by a team of experienced specialists in accordance with set procedures to confirm the validity of the request and narrow or object to requests that are overly broad.”

The move a month ago after the Electronic Frontier Foundation called on the major US exchange to be more transparent about how it handles private user financial data. The EFF also said that Coinbase has to detail the number of requests it receives as well as how it will approach these requests through the use of transparency reports.

Coinbase on Layer 2 will bring more scalability on the market with much news on ETH scaling lately with the biggest being the Coinbase Wallet that integrated with Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup testnet. There was an explosion of ETH scaling developments over the past week with the latest and the biggest one announcing that the Coinbase Wallet is integrated into Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup testnet. The wallet is the US exchange’s non-custodial wallet and the dapp browser and the integration will help the users see their balances and send transactions on the testnet according to the post.