These kinds of things happen all the time in companies. Company relocates team x, company decides not to allow remote but that one engineer doesn’t relocate it or works remotely. Usually because the employees has long tenure/unique skillset/otherwise valuable that losing them would be a big loss.

We don’t have details who exactly was required to relocate and who weren’t. Coinbase’s compliance department is huge made of multiple teams, so it’s not just the handful of people mentioned in this article.