The US Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to pay Coinbase $150,000 in legal fees to resolve a two-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, closing a contentious chapter that exposed how the agency deleted nearly a full year of former Chair Gary Gensler’s text messages.
What the settlement covers
A filing made on Wednesday confirmed the agreement, ending Coinbase’s legal push to obtain internal SEC records at the height of the Biden-era crackdown on crypto. The exchange filed the original suit seeking documents it argued would prove the regulator’s approach amounted to ‘crypto by enforcement’ rather than transparent rulemaking.
An internal watchdog report published in 2025 concluded that ‘avoidable errors’ were responsible for wiping out roughly a year’s worth of text messages exchanged between Gensler and other senior SEC officials.
The agreement resolves the records dispute and the legal costs attached to it. It is not a ruling on the merits of Coinbase’s underlying claim about how the agency approached crypto regulation. The SEC has not publicly commented on the settlement.
Grewal frames the outcome as vindication
Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal framed the outcome as a vindication in an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. ‘The agency tasked with policing corporate record-keeping somehow lost reams of its own text messages between Mr. Gensler and other officials during the most intense period of the anti-crypto campaign,’ Grewal wrote. He said the SEC will pay the $150,000 as an ‘award’ and has overhauled its internal record retention policies as part of the resolution.
The settlement adds to a string of legal outcomes Coinbase has secured under the Trump administration. The SEC, now led by Paul Atkins, has taken a more crypto-friendly approach and dropped several high-profile enforcement actions against crypto firms in 2025, including its case against Coinbase.
FDIC settlement preceded this one
In February, Coinbase separately reached a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Under that agreement, the FDIC paid $188,440 in legal fees and revised its transparency practices after a federal court found the agency had violated the Freedom of Information Act.
That case uncovered dozens of so-called crypto ‘pause letters.’ Grewal described them in an X post as ‘indisputable proof of OCP2.0 and the coordinated effort to sideline the industry,’ referring to the contested allegation that US regulators coordinated to cut crypto firms off from banking services. Regulators have not accepted that characterisation.
Grewal to step back from CLO role
Grewal, who has held the chief legal officer position at Coinbase since 2020, is set to move into an advisory role at the exchange beginning July 31. Coinbase legal vice presidents Molly Abraham and Ryan VanGrack will take over as general counsel and vice chair respectively once that transition takes effect.
