PANews reported on May 20 that according to Decrypt, Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, warned about the recent data leak at Coinbase, saying that the incident "will result in deaths." The leak included sensitive information such as user home addresses and account balances. Arrington believes that this puts high-net-worth crypto holders at risk of physical threats such as kidnapping. He called for criminal prosecution of corporate executives who failed to adequately protect user data.

Coinbase previously disclosed that hackers attempted to extort $20 million in Bitcoin after an overseas customer service employee was bribed to leak user data. The company refused to pay and offered a reward of the same amount to hunt down the criminals, while promising to compensate affected users. The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into this. Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan pointed out that the fundamental problem lies in the government's mandatory KYC data collection system.