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Ex-SEC Director Brett Redfearn Leaves Coinbase After 4 Months

The departure of Coinbase's VP of capital markets points to a strategy shift within the publicly traded crypto exchange.

Updated May 9, 2023, 3:22 a.m. Published Aug 9, 2021, 6:35 p.m.

Coinbase VP of Capital Markets Brett Redfearn is out after just four months on the job, a Coinbase spokesperson told CoinDesk. The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news of the former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) official leaving the company at the end of July.

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The rift points to a strategy shift within the publicly traded crypto exchange, unnamed sources told the paper, with Coinbase deciding to "shift its priorities away from digital-asset securities," the report said.

A source with knowledge of the situation told CoinDesk the priority shift reflected growing consumer demand for access to decentralized finance (DeFi). “As we looked at prioritizing DeFi, we deprioritized the digital-asset securities area,” the source said.

The reportedly "amicable" split with Redfearn comes as actions in Washington and beyond cast doubt on whether tokenized stocks comply with current regulatory frameworks. Binance, in particular, has been hit hard for its securities product, abruptly discontinuing the product in mid-July.

Redfearn's hire was announced March 30, just weeks before Coinbase went public in a hotly anticipated debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Coinbase Securities Regulations

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.