Coinbase (COIN) started the week announcing its upcoming debut on the S&P 500 (^GSPC), but it quickly soured after news of a major cybersecurity breach and an ongoing US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation.

Mark Palmer, Benchmark Company managing director and senior research analyst of fintech and digital assets, joins Asking for a Trend to explain what happened.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

Wanna take a look here at shares of Coinbase this week, as it began with the platform reaching a major milestone, announcing its addition to the S&P 500. But then, things took a turn for the worst yesterday when the company disclosed a significant cyber security breach, confirmed an ongoing SEC investigation regarding its past user metrics. Joining us now to break it all down, the latest is what he calls coins, no good, very bad day. That would be Mark Palmer, Benchmark Company managing director, senior research analyst of Fintech and digital assets. Uh, Mark, it's good to see you. So there is a lot to break down here, Mark. All right, so they're added to the SPX. That's a big achievement. It's a big milestone, but then, Mark, we have this headline-making hack. Let's maybe start there with the hack. I mean, your takeaways from that, Mark. How concerned should investors be about that?

01:34 Mark Palmer

Yes. Uh, well, first of all, thanks very much for having me on. You know, the situation with Coinbase, uh, is really something of a one-off. You know, what we're talking about are, uh, consultants that were hired by the company, uh, for, uh, customer service, uh, abroad. And, uh, the cyber hackers, uh, in this case, uh, got a hold of these people and bribed them to provide them with access to Coinbase's platform. Uh, at which point they were able to access, uh, a lot of different materials about customers' backgrounds, but importantly, none of the login information, none of the, the private keys associated, uh, with crypto, uh, and, um, you know, none of the, um, uh, access to customer wallets. So, as a consequence of this, um, you know, there were no, uh, actual, um, you know, big amounts of money that were lifted off the platform, as you typically will see, uh, with some of these hacking incidents. With that said, um, you know, this is, it's always a concern when an exchange has a breach. Um, but management moved quickly. Uh, they came out with all of the information about what had happened, um, as fully as they could, uh, and they had a remediation plan in place, uh, which, uh, would ultimately help to compensate any of those who are impacted by this, um, you know, to the tune of between $180 and $400 million. Uh, so it's a bizarre story, uh, but, uh, it really didn't have anything to do, uh, with the various, uh, cyber security, uh, protection measures, uh, that the company has in place. This was really, uh, more of the real world type of, uh, incident that we're talking about here.  Related Videos

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