‘Really Great Example’: Coinbase Praised for Hack Response Amid $400M Crisis

The global head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics firm that helps law enforcement investigate crypto fraud, shared that he believes Coinbase’s handling of the latest hack is a “really great example to other businesses in terms of how to handle” dealing with hacks of exchanges.

At a panel at Consensus 2025, Ari Redbord discussed how easy it is for hacks to happen on crypto exchanges, as the industry is “the perfect storm of weak cyber controls and ultimately it’s a good target.”

Coinbase shared earlier on Thursday that some of its staff had been bribed to steal their customers’ data, and its founder Brian Armstrong had received a ransome note for $20 million dollars in bitcoin.

The team shared in a blog post that because of the breach, it could pay up to $400 million in remediation costs to affected customers, and that they were setting up a $20 million bounty on any information related to the attackers instead.

The news comes as the industry has experienced other major hacks, like Bybit which was hacked earlier this year for $1.5 billion, and defunct crypto exchange FTX in November 2022 for $400 million.

Though these episodes seem to happen frequently, Redbord believes more regulatory involvement can alleviate some of these issues. “There’s a lot we can do with governments in order to go after these bad actors that have nothing to do with crypto or blockchain intelligence,” he said. “We have cyber facilities.”