‘Bring More Lambs:’ Researcher Slams Brian Armstrong Over Coinbase Security Failures

Crypto safety researcher Taylor Monahan has publicly slammed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and accused the change’s management of prioritizing progress over person security.

Security failures tied to Coinbase Commerce resurfaced as Armstrong unveiled the corporate’s 2026 roadmap.

Old Wounds, New Roadmap

Responding to Armstrong’s tweet about Coinbase’s prime priorities for 2026, which targeted on increasing a worldwide “all the things change,” scaling stablecoins and funds, and bringing the world on-chain by Base, Monahan argued that person safety stays noticeably absent. She wrote,

“Brian nonetheless doesn’t see person security to be a precedence for Coinbase. It value them >$350m in 2025. It might’ve been prevented.”

Monahan claimed that Coinbase had been warned for “months and months and months” about critical safety points. Her frustration traces again to findings revealed by on-chain investigator ZachXBT in December 2024, which detailed a suspected exploit involving Coinbase Commerce.

According to the investigation, a Coinbase Commerce contract noticed greater than $15.9 million in suspicious USDC outflows on Polygon over a 16-hour interval in April 2024, and funds have been later bridged to Ethereum, swapped into ETH, and break up throughout a number of wallets.

A menace actor utilizing the alias “Excite” allegedly flaunted management of the stolen funds in Telegram chats and on social media, whereas a portion of the belongings was later routed by mixers and playing platforms in an try and obscure their origin. The case raised questions on why Coinbase’s AML and transaction monitoring techniques didn’t flag the exercise in actual time, regardless of the scale, pace, and sample of the outflows.

Monahan had amplified these considerations on the time, criticizing the platform’s failure to deal with the difficulty. Now, greater than a 12 months later, the blockchain researcher says nothing basic has modified. Reacting to Armstrong’s newest roadmap, she accused the change’s management of pushing for extra customers with out first fixing identified vulnerabilities.

“Literally over a 12 months later. And the precedence remains to be ‘carry extra lambs to my slaughterhouse pls.’”

Handling of Security Incidents

ZachXBT, for one, had repeatedly criticized Coinbase over account lockouts and an undisclosed knowledge breach that he says led to person losses. Last 12 months, he claimed that Coinbase locked him out of his account twice inside a month with out clarification and failed to obviously inform customers a couple of breach that uncovered buyer knowledge.

The pseudonymous investigator had additionally mentioned that he can not advocate the platform as a consequence of ongoing transparency and safety points. His feedback add to previous criticism, together with claims that weak responses to scams and impersonation assaults contributed to tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in losses between late 2024 and early 2025.

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