Re:CFTC Orders Coinbase Inc. To Pay $6.5M Penalty
by PragmaticPulp on Friday March 19, 2021 @10:34PM
(#26520299)
The worst part is at the bottom:
> The order also finds that over a six-week period—August through September 2016—a former Coinbase employee used a manipulative or deceptive device by intentionally placing buy and sell orders in the Litecoin/Bitcoin trading pair on GDAX that matched each other as wash trades. This created the misleading appearance of liquidity and trading interest in Litecoin.
We always knew that wash trading activity was rampant in the cryptocurrency space, but I didn't actually expect Coinbase employees to be doing it within Coinbase. If employees of the most regulated exchange in the world were wash trading with some regularity, makes you wonder how bad it must be at some of the more Wild West exchanges.
> The order also finds that over a six-week period—August through September 2016—a former Coinbase employee used a manipulative or deceptive device by intentionally placing buy and sell orders in the Litecoin/Bitcoin trading pair on GDAX that matched each other as wash trades. This created the misleading appearance of liquidity and trading interest in Litecoin.
We always knew that wash trading activity was rampant in the cryptocurrency space, but I didn't actually expect Coinbase employees to be doing it within Coinbase. If employees of the most regulated exchange in the world were wash trading with some regularity, makes you wonder how bad it must be at some of the more Wild West exchanges.