A U.S. federal district court judge on Tuesday, November 29 ordered Coinbase Inc., the largest cryptocurrency exchange and storage platform in the world, to provide information about certain of its account holders to the U.S. Internal Revenue Services (IRS).  Information pertaining to as many as 14,355 account holders and 8.9 million transactions could be covered in this order, according to estimates provided by Coinbase.  The full order by Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California can be found here.

While a significant milestone in a protracted legal battle between Coinbase and the IRS, the order handed down by Judge Corley is considerably narrower than what the IRS had originally requested.  The information Coinbase must provide is limited to the holder’s name, date of birth, taxpayer identification number (TIN), and address; the date, amount, type of transaction, post-transaction balance, and names of counterparties to any transaction covered by the order; and periodic account statements for the covered accounts.  Significantly, only account holders that have bought, sold, sent, or received cryptocurrency worth $20,000 or more in any tax year from 2013 to 2015 are covered by the order.