Lawyers for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have requested a delay until February 2025 to provide “hundreds of thousands of documents” in their legal battle with Coinbase.
In a Sept. 18 court filing, the SEC asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to extend the deadline for producing documents by four months, originally set for Oct. 18.
This follows a partial win for Coinbase in its motion to compel discovery, which requires the SEC to provide details on how it applies securities laws to tokens.
The SEC stated that it’s currently reviewing over 133,000 unique documents, and the extension would give them the time needed to comply with the court’s order.
If the extension is approved by Judge Katherine Failla, the SEC would have until Feb. 18, 2025, to produce fact discovery documents, and expert discovery—including depositions—would have a new deadline of April 22, 2025. If the case proceeds to trial, it likely wouldn’t begin until 2025.
This legal battle is part of a broader clash between the SEC and several crypto exchanges. At the same time, U.S. lawmakers are debating the SEC’s role in crypto regulation. The House Subcommittee on Digital Assets recently discussed whether the SEC’s approach under Chair Gary Gensler has been overly political.
In addition to its case against Coinbase, the SEC has been involved in major lawsuits against other firms like Ripple Labs, Terraform Labs, and Binance. It remains unclear whether potential changes in SEC leadership after the 2024 U.S. elections will have a significant impact on these court cases.