Coinbase Goes In Deeper With The Government

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Surprise surprise, Coinbase is at it again. Going in deeper with the US government, this time with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). They will be supplying the agency with crypto user geolocation and transaction data, according to a contract that was picked up by a non profit called Tech Inquiry which is a small nonprofit that maps out relationships between companies, nonprofits, and governments to better contextualize and investigate corporate influence.

The response from Coinbase, reported by Coin Desk states:

“All Coinbase Tracer (formerly Coinbase Analytics) features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data.”

There were actually 2 deals that were signed, the first being in August in 2021 for $29,000 and the second in September 2021 for $1.37 million. According to Coin Desk, “In April 2021 and May 2020, Coinbase sold licenses – both initially under $50,000 – from Coinbase Tracer to the U.S. Secret Service.”

Coinbase is known to have a contract with the IRS, US Secret Service, and the DEA among who knows what other 3 letter agencies. So know one other than Coinbase and the government know what is actually being reported. We do not know if it is only for known immigrants who are bringing crypto into the US for tax purposes, or are we tracking US citizens that are trying to leave the country with their crypto?

The contract states that the government is using Coinbase to track 12 specific coins.

The 12 coins are:

BTC, ETH, BCH ABC, LTC, USDT, XRP, XLM, EOS, ZEC, DASH, and ZEN. This also includes ALL ERC-20 tokens connected to Ethereum.

Here is the snippet directly from the contract:

It is safe to say at this point that the only way to secure your cryptocurrency is to get if off of centralized exchanges as soon as possible. Not your keys, not your coins. At least we now know what tokens the US government is paying attention to, and which they are not so interested in, or just can’t crack, uh hum, Monero…