On April 27, Coinbase, the crypto exchange based in San Francisco, made public the disclosure of its response to the Wells notice it had received from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) back in March.

“If the commission had believed in April 2021 that Coinbase’s core businesses violated securities law, it would have been required by its own mandate to prevent the S-1 from becoming effective to protect the investing public,” the response says. “Instead, it allowed the offering to proceed, and millions of members of the public invested their savings in Coinbase. Investors could only infer by this approval that the Commission did not think Coinbase’s core business was unlawful.”