The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said on Friday digital asset exchange Coinbase Inc paid $6.5 million to settle charges it reported misleading transaction data that potentially inflated the apparent trading volume on its professional GDAX platform.
The regulator also fined the company for so-called “wash trades” in litecoin and bitcoin by a former Coinbase employee on GDAX, it said in a statement. The settlement comes ahead of a planned stock market listing for the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which is valued at around $68 billion based on private market transactions, the company said on Wednesday.
The eye-popping figure, which implies Coinbase is more valuable than the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, underscores how the perceived value of Coinbase has rallied in lock-step with the surge in the price of bitcoin.
“The settlement order today does not include any finding of harm to any Coinbase customer,” a Coinbase spokesman said. “While Coinbase neither admits nor denies the CFTC’s findings, we firmly believe that Coinbase has always aimed to create a reliable and secure trading environment for the benefit of our customers.”
