On April 13, a crypto influencer Cobie found that an unknown ETH address bought $400,000 worth of tokens the exchange plans to list hours before the official announcement. Some crypto community members suspected that Coinbase employees were guilty of insider trading abuse.
Armstrong addressed this accusation, admitting that someone inside Coinbase could, wittingly or unwittingly, leak information to outsiders. However, there’s also a chance that an anonymous investor simply took advantage of data from the listing process, using slight differences in Coinbase API responses to detect when the exchange might be testing new asset integrations.
Brian Armstrong wrote that they plan to prevent on-chain data from giving a signal to watchful traders and label newer and less proven assets on the platform. Additionally, Coinbase will launch asset ratings and reviews and invest even more in on-chain forensic tools to evaluate each project.
