Coinbase’s Early Jeffrey Epstein Connections Resurface—Reviving XRP Delisting and SEC Scrutiny Questions
Old ghosts haunt the exchange giant as past associations trigger fresh regulatory doubts.
Shadow Over the Throne
A newly surfaced link—however tenuous or dated—between Coinbase and the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is sending shudders through crypto compliance departments. It’s not the link itself that’s the immediate concern; it’s the timing. Regulatory hawks have long memories, and this gives them fresh ammunition.
The XRP Echo
Remember when Coinbase abruptly delisted XRP following the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple? That move was framed as a pure compliance decision. Now, critics are asking: was it also a preemptive strike to burnish regulatory credentials? The Epstein connection, however tangential, resurrects questions about the exchange’s broader risk calculus and its relationship with watchdogs. Every move gets re-litigated in the court of public opinion—especially when the SEC is the judge.
Scrutiny on Steroids
For the SEC, this is a gift. It allows them to reframe routine oversight as a deeper, more necessary probe into ‘associational risk.’ Expect longer document requests, tougher questions about KYC and AML histories, and a general tightening of the screws. It’s the regulatory equivalent of a stress test the exchange never asked for.
The Cynical Take
In traditional finance, a few degrees of separation from a criminal might earn you a stern memo and a compliance seminar. In crypto, it fuels a week of panic-selling and a thousand conspiracy threads. The market punishes perception faster than any regulator ever could—proving once again that in digital assets, the court of Twitter is often in session before the real one even opens.
Coinbase now faces a dual-front battle: managing the narrative in a hyper-reactive market while navigating a regulatory landscape that just found a new reason to be skeptical. For an industry built on trustless systems, trust remains its most fragile asset.
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.”
The sad part is, we really are all in this together and this kind of attitude hurts everyone in the space.
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) January 31, 2026
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.
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