Brian Armstrong: “Coinbase will exit ETH staking if necessary”

According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the site will stop participating in ETH staking if US regulators require to censor transactions.

Brian Armstrong made his statement in response to a message from the founder of the rotkiapp project, Lefteris Karapetsas, who asked about the views of various cryptocurrency platforms on such a hypothetical situation.

“This is a hypothetical request from regulators, which I hope we will not see in real life. But in the case of a demand, we would go for option B, that is, stop participating in staking, in order to maintain the integrity of the network. Though perhaps we would have found a better option, or launched a lawsuit that could lead to a resolution of the situation,” the Coinbase CEO wrote.

Recall that Coinbase launched ETH 2.0 staking at the beginning of the year, and it was recently reported that the exchange plans to focus on staking before switching the Ethereum network to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. It seems that the management of the site is still more committed to maintaining the integrity of the network of the second cryptocurrency than to fulfilling the hypothetical requirements of regulators to censor transactions.

In early August, the US Department of the Treasury placed the addresses of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer on the sanctions list, which led to a huge amount of discussion and disagreement in the cryptocurrency community. Including discussion of such hypothetical situations. The arrest of the creator of the mixing service, Alexei Pertsev, added fuel to the fire.