Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. has been fined $6.5 million by the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commision to settle allegations that it undertook reckless false, misleading or inaccurate reporting as well as so-called wash trading between 2015 and 2018. Along with the fine, announced Friday, Coinbase is also subject to stop any further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act or CFTC regulations. Between January 2015 and September 2018, Coinbase is said to have operated two automated trading programs, Hedger and Replicator, that generated orders that at times matched one another on the GDAX electronic trading platform operated by the company. Although the GDAX rules did disclose that Coinbase was trading on the GDAX it failed to disclose that Coinbase was operating more than one trading program and trading through multiple accounts. The problem is that in operating multiple programs and accounts, Coinbase was essentially creating trades between itself that then boosted trading volume and could have misled traders about the real volume on the exchange, which today is known as Coinbase Pro. The boosted trading data from Coinbase was also then fed to third-party reporting services such as the CME Bitcoin Real Time Index, CoinMarketCap and the NYSE Bitcoin Index. According to the order, “transactional information of this type is used by market participants for price discovery related to trading or owning digital assets and potentially resulted in a perceived volume and level of liquidity of digital assets, including bitcoin, that was false, misleading or inaccurate.” From August to September 2016, the CTFC also found, a former Coinbase employee used a “manipulative or deceptive device” by intentionally trading in Litecoin/bitcoin pairs on GDAX that matched each other as “wash trades,” creating a misleading appearance of liquidity in Litecoin. Wash trading is a form of market manipulation where an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same financial instruments to create artificial activity in the marketplace. As part of the order, Coinbase itself has not admitted or denied the CFTC’s charges. A spokesperson for the exchange told The Verge Saturday that the settlement order “does not include any finding of harm to any Coinbase customer.” The fine from the CTFC comes ahead of Coinbase’s plans to go public. After first announcing that it had filed a draft registration for an initial public offer in December, Coinbase said it had decided to go public via a direct listing Jan. 28 instead. Image: Coinbase Since you’re here … Show your support for our mission with our one-click subscription to our YouTube channel (below). The more subscribers we have, the more YouTube will suggest relevant enterprise and emerging technology content to you. Thanks! Support our mission:    >>>>>>  SUBSCRIBE NOW >>>>>>  to our YouTube channel. … We’d also like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content. If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.