If you follow crypto, you probably find yourself becoming an expert in a few different fields, depending on the day. One day you’re an engineer, the next day you’re an art enthusiast. Some weeks you’re a trader, and this week, you were likely a securities lawyer. 

It’s been a dizzying week of developments around Coinbase. Its stock has tumbled 12% since Bloomberg broke the news of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the cryptocurrency exchange around whether it let customers trade digital assets that were unregistered securities. But the context around that report is significant, so let’s start with a timeline with all the lawyerly events of the past week, and then we’ll get to what all this means.