Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have reached an agreement according to which the exchange will pay a $ 6.5 million fine.
The agreement states that once the fine has been paid, the CFTC will not prosecute Coinbase on two charges: overstating the trading volume by one of the exchange employees during a six-week period in 2016, and false information about trading activity on the GDAX platform.
“From January 2015 to September 2018, the Coinbase exchange irresponsibly provided false, misleading and inaccurate reports on transactions with digital assets, including bitcoin, on the electronic platform GDAX, which was operated by the exchange,” the American regulator said in a statement.
As a reminder, the GDAX platform was intended for institutional investors and was subsequently renamed Coinbase Pro. Funds transfers between GDAX and the Hedger project were counted as trading volumes, which the CFTC believed was a mistake. In addition, the Replicator function made it possible to duplicate the order book for one asset for other pairs, which is considered unreliable information.
“The CFTC discovered that for six weeks in August and September 2016, a former Coinbase employee manipulated to place buy and sell orders in the BTC / LTC pair. This created a misconception about liquidity and trading activity in the pair. These false trades accounted for 0.62% to 99% of the daily trading volume. We find Coinbase guilty of these acts of its employee, ”- said in a statement.
At the same time, CFTC Commissioner Dawn Stump emphasized that this is a separate investigation, and the CFTC does not regulate the Coinbase exchange.
As a reminder, Coinbase is gearing up for a direct listing on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. During the preliminary assessment, the cryptocurrency platform was estimated at $ 943 million. 115 million shares of Coinbase will be placed on the Nasdaq.
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