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Home » Business » Brian Armstrong’s ‘Make Coinbase Great Again’ campaign falling flat

Brian Armstrong’s ‘Make Coinbase Great Again’ campaign falling flat

BUSINESS

1 HOUR AGO

Steven Stradbrooke

Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is trying to rally support for reducing regulatory oversight of its operations, even as U.S. regulators warn that additional oversight is on the way.

On Tuesday, the digital asset exchange issued a ‘call to action’ aimed at mobilizing what it claims are the 52 million Americans who own some form of ‘crypto.’ The exchange wants these minions, er, millions to call their congressperson on September 27, the Coinbase-designated ‘Stand with Crypto Day,’ to convince Congress to pass “clear, sensible legislation” on digital assets.

Coinbase wants callers to put “intense focus” on politicians in nine states—AZ, CA, GA, IL, NH, NV, OH, PA, and WI—and the Georgia effort is weirdly focused on building “a club of crypto of at least 11,779 members.” We can’t help but notice that is exactly one more than the 11,780 votes former President Donald Trump asked Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” to flip the state’s 2020 presidential election results. Is the exchange road-testing a new ‘Make Coinbase Great Again’ slogan? Is Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong about to crown his bald head with an epic blonde weave?

Rug or rug-pull, whatever Coinbase is planning, it doesn’t seem to be working. Armstrong recently tweeted his irritation at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) having taken action against three ‘decentralized finance’ (DeFi) platforms (Opyn, ZeroEx and Deridex).

The three platforms failed to clear a number of regulatory hurdles, leading CFTC enforcement director Ian McGinley to muse that “DeFi operators got the idea that unlawful transactions become lawful when facilitated by smart contracts. They do not.”

Armstrong said the CFTC “should not be creating enforcement actions against” DeFi protocols and expressed the hope