Coinbase (Class Action Lawsuit Over Insider Trading)

Coinbase hit with class-action lawsuit for Insider Trading

I remember watching the listing live on GDAX (a trading platform of Coinbase).

I realized right away that some people with insider knowledge were able to buy and move many millions worth of Bitcoin Cash in advance of the listing. Then sell it at an extremely overinflated premium as Coinbase wasn't able to deal with the liquidity. I took a screenshot of the depth chart. At one point, BCC was selling for $9,500 on Coinbase, where everywhere else it was selling for $4,000. Even the price of BCC at $4,000 was overinflated as Insiders were able to buy ridiculous amounts of BCC prior to the Coinbase listing.

Here are some text from the lawsuit:

1 . This is a class action on behalf of all Coinbase customers who placed purchase, sale or trade orders with Coinbase or the GDAX in connection with Coinbase’s launch of BCH during the period of December 19, 2017 through and including December 21, 2017 (the “Class Period”) and who suffered monetary loss as a result of Defendants’ wrongdoing (the “Class”). Excluded from the Class are Defendants, any entity owned or controlled by them, and any officer, director, employee or agent of any of the Defendants, and any heirs, assigns, or family members of any individual defendant.

67 . To date, the Company has not publicly denied that in fact insider trading occurred or the results of the purported internal investigation.

68 . Rather, in a January 9, 2018 GDAX blog, Adam White (“White”), the Company’s general manger, in an article entitled, “Bitcoin Cash Launch Retrospective”, admitted that employees were notified of Coinbase’s decision to support BCH trading on November 13, 2017, over a month before Coinbase’s customers, so that the employees had a month to craft the trading strategies to employ the moment that Coinbase enabled CTH trading. White then reiterated that employees were barred from sharing this confidential information and from buying and selling without stating whether in fact insider trading had taken place or whether the purported “internal investigation” had yielded any results

Many millions of dollars were profited off of unwitting cryptocurrency investors.