Bitcoin (BTC) exchange Coinbase has recently closed a million dollar deal with US police and immigration services. The US immigaration and customs enforcement (ICE) spent $1.36 million on a new contract with the major US crypto exchange, according to Twitter user Jack Poulson.
In the Tweet, Poulson stated “Cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase has a new award with ICE which is either 15x or nearly 50x as large as its previous award, depending on how you count. It is Coinbase’s largest Fed contract.”
ICE is the US federal government’s controversial immigration and customs agency that falls under the US Department of Homeland Security. The contract made between ICE and Coinbase is the largest of its kind ever signed by Coinbase with the US government. ICE has already purchased blockchain analysis software from Coinbase, back in August for $29,000. The firm is yet to disclose what this will be used for.
The new contract has been signed for an amount 45 times larger than the previous one and this is not the first time that the crypto exchange has sold analytics software to a US government agency. Last summer, Coinbase announced that the company would sell its software to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS). After agreeing to sell the software, Coinbase received a lot of criticism from those in the crypto community. Nevertheless, the contract was signed one month later with the US Secret Service for $184 thousand.
Controversy of the Coinbase software
The Coinbase software is not short of controversy itself. The software comes from Neutrino, a research company acquired by Coinbase at the end of 2019. This sparked the #deleteCoinbase movement on Twitter as several neutrino employees were linked to a hacker group that sold spyware to authoritarian regimes. The workers in question were fired soon after the Twitter campaign broke out.
Coinbase also acquired analytics firm Skew a few months ago despite the fact that the exchange clearly wants to keep peace with the US government. Recent activities suggest that it may get into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission soon.
Read more about Coibase’s recent feud with the SEC here.
Earlier this year, Coinbase had to pay out a multi-million dollar fine to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) earlier this year. The exchange has also recently faced scrutiny for the USDC stablecoin and customer service. However, the firm recently raised $2 billion from investors and applied for a new derivatives license.
