The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to pay $150,000 and release two withheld documents to end a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit backed by Coinbase. The settlement, reached on July 22, also requires the agency to review its records and text-message preservation practices. The case stemmed from requests about Ethereum investigations and former Chair Gary Gensler’s communications.
History Associates Inc., working on behalf of Coinbase, filed the lawsuit in June 2024 after the SEC did not fully respond to records requests on Ethereum’s shift to proof-of-stake and related enforcement actions. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia case will be dismissed once the agency completes production of the remaining documents.
The agreement includes no admission of wrongdoing by the SEC. It follows an inspector general report from September 2025 that found avoidable errors led to the loss of Gensler’s text messages from October 2022 through September 2023.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong linked the outcome to broader accountability issues. “The Gensler SEC deleted texts at the height of the anti-crypto campaign, FDIC buried evidence - it was all uncovered after we fought to expose the truth,” he wrote on X.
Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal described the result as a win for transparency. The scope of the records review remains unclear, though Reuters and Law360 reported the agency will examine its document-retention policies.
