A research firm Coinbase hired intends to ask a judge for a quick call on whether it should get key SEC documents that might reveal how the agency came to view crypto tokens as securities.
The federal court could decide whether the company (and the public) get to see what the SEC officials said in private discussions as they tried to figure out whether digital assets like ETH should be counted as securities.

An intermediary for the biggest U.S. crypto exchange, Coinbase Inc. (COIN), is cranking up its legal fight over the Securities and Exchange Commission's unwillingness to produce documents revealing the regulator's internal thinking on whether to pursue Ethereum's ether (ETH) and other tokens as illegal securities.

Coinbase hired History Associates Inc. to pursue SEC communications under the Freedom of Information Act – a process that initially concluded with the agency denying the request by citing that the documents were connected to an ongoing investigation. Coinbase's hired gun eventually sued over the denial, and History Associates is preparing to ask the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force the hand of the agency, which has since suggested the reason for its initial denial may no longer be valid.

"Lacking reasonable alternatives, History Associates intends to move for partial summary

judgment on the SEC-generated documents," the company said in a notice filed on Monday with the court, detailing that plan to ask for a court ruling.

A spokesperson for the SEC told CoinDesk the agency declines to comment "beyond our public filings."

"Over a year ago we made FOIA requests aimed at files on ETH 2.0 and other mysteries," Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said in a posting on X, arguing that the internal agency communications "belong to all of us," not the SEC. "We then sued to end their stall, only to get an entirely new set of excuses."

Coinbase has been conducting a multi-front legal fight with the SEC, including battling over an SEC enforcement action that accused the company of running an illegal securities business, a petition by the company to force the agency to make crypto-specific regulations and this conflict over whether insider messages on the SEC's crypto thinking should be subject to public review. These disputes could – in the absence of swift congressional action – eventually form some legal foundation for how the digital assets industry may proceed in the U.S.

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Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.