Early Jeffrey Epstein ties to Coinbase bring back XRP delisting, SEC scrutiny questions

Coinbase delisted Ripple’s token just two weeks after the SEC filed a case against the issuer. However, according to social media chatter, Jeffrey Epstein could have pushed the exchange to let go of XRP.

In the documents released by the US Justice Department last Friday, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had financial ties to Coinbase. Epstein reportedly invested $3 million in the US-based crypto trading platform in 2014, as part of a $75 million round. Several other Silicon Valley firms also took part in the funding, including DFJ and Andreessen Horowitz. 

The revelations resurfaced the battle Ripple had with regulators, whose XRP token was delisted by Coinbase in January 2021, shortly after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple. 

The regulator, then led by former commissioner Gary Gensler, alleged the company conducted a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering through XRP sales.

Epstein’s Coinbase investment opens Ripple vs SEC wounds

According to the latest chatter on Crypto Twitter, the opposition to Ripple could have come from a group of elitists influenced by the convicted sex trafficker. Some users on X suggest that the opposition XRP faced from crypto firms in 2014 influenced regulators to go after Ripple and exchanges that delisted its token. 

No evidence in the documents directly links Epstein to Coinbase’s decision to delist. However, the emails seen in the latest stash of files show he held an investment allocation in Blockstream in 2014. In an email dated July 31 that year, then-chief executive Austin Hill wrote about reducing or removing Epstein’s allocation.

According to the correspondence, Hill said Ripple and Stellar were “bad for the ecosystem we are building,” and that backing them could undermine Blockstream’s strategic direction. 

However, attorney Bill Morgan propounded that the email “implicating Epstein’s desire to harm Ripple and by extension XRP/XRPL” came years before the US watchdog started its query into the stablecoin issuer, between April and June 2018.

“The SEC investigation did not commence until sometime between April and June 2018, just before or about the time of the Ethereum free pass speech of Bill Hinman,” Morgan explained.

Morgan also referenced another disclosed email between Epstein and former SEC chair Gensler in May 2018, which Cryptopolitan covered earlier this week. The message allegedly noted Gensler’s links to Elizabeth Warren and an anti-crypto faction within Democratic circles, but did not provide any link between Epstein and Hill’s messages and the probe into Ripple six years later.

Ripple’s former chief technology officer, David Schwartz, said the 2014 email is only a small part of the opposition the crypto company faced. Schwartz suggested the correspondence is just the tip of a giant iceberg.”

He wrote on X that the email showed Austin Hill telling Epstein that support for Ripple or Stellar made someone an adversary. The sad part is, we really are all in this together, and this kind of attitude hurts everyone in the space,” Schwartz wrote on X. 

Crypto exchanges’ XRP delisting caused a massive selloff 

When Coinbase halted XRP trading in January 2021 after the SEC filed a complaint against Ripple, several other platforms, including Crypto.com and OKCoin, followed suit. One X user, who claimed to have joined Coinbase during its debut days, said Coinbase removed XRP transaction data from South Korean markets when prices on those venues were reportedly higher.

The user wrote that XRP had surpassed Ethereum as the second-largest crypto by market value. They claimed the data removal made XRP appear to fall sharply. According to the post, a panic-selling phase for the token helped Ether regain the number two position, leaving XRP in third place by a wide margin.

These claims are unverified, and Coinbase has not publicly addressed the specific allegations about the Korean market data. The exchange insisted the reason for suspending XRP was because of the regulatory concerns it had been facing from the SEC.

According to the Washington Post, Epstein still held his Coinbase stake in 2017, which was later confirmed by the Justice Department. A January 2018 email revealed that Stephens at Blockchain Capital offered to purchase half the holding.

In February 2018, Epstein sold half his Coinbase stake and received $15 million. That amount is ten times what he paid for that portion in 2014, as confirmed by Blockchain Capital.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.