#DeleteCoinbase Followup - Coinbase Buys Neutrino For 13.5 Million USD

The fact that Coinbase removed Nutrino after the #DeleteCoinbase campaign went viral recently is not just a testament to the PR wisdom of Coinbase but more importantly a victory for people power. The global cryptocurrency community is a relatively small one, but they are well-informed and well connected. They are the geeks and first movers in a new digital revolution, so you can’t fool them or think that they won’t find out exactly what you’re doing as a service provider or large corporation in the industry. Someone from some corner of the earth will trace your activity and soon the rest of the world will know.

After all that’s why we have Twitter, Telegram and Reddit.

So when Coinbase, supposedly one of the biggest and most relied upon crypto exchanges in the world, bought Nutrino as their blockchain analytics firm, it didn’t take long before the news was out that Nutrino is actually Hacking Team, a company labelled by Reporters Without Borders as an “Enemy of the Internet”.

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Hacking Team had been instrumental in a series of horrific events worldwide by selling their technology and skills to countries so that they could spy on their citizens, invade their privacy and even worse, engage in human rights violations, espionage, rigging government elections and – by association - outright murder. The latter was due to doing business with Saudi Arabia for example, who hit world media headlines like a bombshell when a well-known Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey.

If there’s one thing crypto enthusiasts dislike it’s invasion of privacy, so when Coinbase bought ex-Hacking Team now known as Nutrino, they really showed that they did not have their finger on the pulse of their clients’ minds and the crypto community as a whole.

It seems obvious to anyone in crypto that this was a bad move. But it gets worse. The real blunder was when Coinbase not only justified the $13 million purchase of Nutrino by saying they were the best in their field, but when they admitted that the reason they needed a new company to handle KYC and AML for them was because the previous company had already been selling users data to outside sources.

It’s hard to say which was the worse “faux pas” – buying out Nutrino ex cyber mercenaries, or allowing their previous team to sell customer data, or revealing to the world that their ex team was selling said data.

It all just goes from bad to worse for the Coinbase PR team and the overall reputation of the world’s biggest exchange handling multi-millions of our crypto and dollars daily. Oh yes, and added to that is the fact that Nutrino was far from the best company in their field. Jesse Powell, the CEO of another popular exchange, Kraken, had already engaged his compliance team in dong an evaluation and they found Nutrino to be the worst, coming last out of five companies reviewed. Besides that they were already considered disqualified due to the obvious security risks they posed based on their past nefarious dealings.

How will Coinbase survive this disaster, we have to ask? If you use the exchange, your data may already have been sold off to someone else, and that is a serious taboo in the crypto world. Bitcoin prides itself in being decentralised and potentially anonymous. That is the core ethos of the newest and most revolutionary tool of economic empowerment for the citizens of the world, who are tired of being abused by banks and governments trampling on their human rights. So when a reputable company like Coinbase falls to this level, one wonders how any self-respecting crypto enthusiast can still carry on using their services.

The #DeleteCoinbase movement should carry on and continue to call for the boycott of such a foolish company. It will set the standard for future exchanges and crypto projects, as well as show the power of the people when using the social media available to us.

The initial choice of buying Nutrino was a poorly thought out one, but it got worse when they admitted that their previous crew had already done the same suspect deed that Nutrino was known to engage in. Presumably they have been given the benefit of the doubt because they complied with the will of the people and apparently got rid of Nutrino staff originally connected to Hacking Team. That may have helped them to save face. However, how do we really know for sure what’s still going on at

Coinbase, despite what they tell the world?

Who are they employing and what tactics are being used behind the scenes at the exchange?

All the more reason to keep most of your crypto off the exchanges and to migrate toward decentralised exchanges that are now emerging in the industry. If you want anonymity and security in your financial dealings and crypto trading, then there are much better alternatives to Coinbase and even Binance, who are also engaging in questionable practices, despite their new Dex, according to some investigators.

Let us know in the comments below which exchanges you would recommend for security and privacy.

Let’s keep ourselves informed as a community.

Sharing valuable experience and insight among ourselves is the best way to stay clear of the risks and pitfalls so keep the network of information flowing. In this trustless industry involving our hard-earned wealth, it helps to keep each other informed and it pays to maintain an honest reputation if you want to make progress in the long run.

As a character said in one of the X-Men movies once: “In times like these, all us freaks have is each other.”