Coinbase has renewed its public push to restore crypto staking access across the United States, arguing that users in four states have been prevented from earning significant rewards even as the broader regulatory climate has started to improve. In a statement posted on X, the company said crypto holders in California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Wisconsin have missed out on an estimated more than $90 million in staking rewards since June 2023, with losses still accumulating.
The company framed the issue as one of consumer access rather than product failure. According to Coinbase, users who staked through its platform have not lost their assets, but residents in the remaining restrictive states have been unable to participate at all. Coinbase said it will continue fighting to fully restore staking rights nationwide.
Four states remain the main holdouts
Coinbase said that while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and more than 40 states now permit its users to stake crypto, the four states still maintaining barriers are California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Wisconsin. The company highlighted the state-by-state impact in financial terms, underscoring how much potential yield users have been unable to collect over the past two years.
By Coinbase’s estimate, users in Wisconsin have missed roughly $3 million in staking rewards since June 2023. In Maryland, the figure is about $5 million. In New Jersey, forgone rewards total around $12 million. California, the largest market among the four, accounts for the overwhelming majority of the total, with users there unable to earn nearly $71 million in rewards.
Those numbers are central to Coinbase’s messaging. Rather than discussing staking only as a legal or technical issue, the company is increasingly presenting it as an economic rights question for retail and institutional crypto holders who want access to blockchain-based yield opportunities.
Regulatory momentum has shifted in Coinbase’s favor
The latest push comes after a series of legal reversals that have improved Coinbase’s position. According to the report, five U.S. states—Vermont, South Carolina, Kentucky, Illinois, and Alabama—have now formally withdrawn their staking-related lawsuits against the exchange. The most recent development came on April 23, when Alabama’s Securities Commission dismissed its case.
Alabama cited ongoing collaborative work between the SEC and the crypto industry to build clearer regulatory standards. That language is notable because it suggests that at least some state regulators now see a path toward a more defined framework rather than continued litigation as the primary tool for oversight.
The state-level withdrawals followed an even more consequential federal development. Earlier this year, in February, the SEC moved to dismiss its lawsuit against Coinbase. That decision marked a sharp turn from the agency’s earlier enforcement posture and appears to have encouraged several states to reconsider whether continuing their own actions remains justified.
Coinbase argues staking is essential to crypto participation
Coinbase has consistently maintained that staking should not be treated as an activity outside the reach of ordinary users. In its latest comments, the company again emphasized that staking plays a broader role in the digital asset ecosystem. Beyond generating rewards for token holders, staking helps support blockchain security, network operations, and user participation in proof-of-stake systems.
By making that argument, Coinbase is trying to position staking as infrastructure, not simply as a yield product. The distinction matters because the regulatory debate in the United States has often focused on whether staking services offered by exchanges should be restricted or regulated as securities-related offerings. Coinbase’s stance is that preventing access harms users and weakens participation in core blockchain functions.
The company’s latest statement also reflects a broader strategic choice: keeping public attention on the practical cost of restrictions. By citing forgone rewards in dollar terms and breaking them down by state, Coinbase is appealing not just to policymakers and courts, but also to users who may view staking bans as directly affecting their financial outcomes.
Pressure now centers on the remaining restrictive jurisdictions
With the SEC stepping back and several states dropping their cases, the policy battlefield has narrowed. The four remaining states now stand out as the principal obstacles to Coinbase’s goal of nationwide staking access. California is especially significant because of the scale of the market and the size of the rewards Coinbase says users there have lost.
For Coinbase, that makes the next phase of the fight highly targeted. The company appears intent on using the changing federal tone, the withdrawal of multiple state lawsuits, and the cumulative reward figures to argue that continued restrictions are increasingly difficult to defend.
Whether those four states ultimately change course remains uncertain. But the direction of travel is clearer than it was a year ago: federal pressure has eased, several states have retreated, and Coinbase is using that momentum to argue that crypto staking access should be restored everywhere in the country. Until that happens, the company says, users in the holdout states will continue missing out on potential rewards that their peers elsewhere in the U.S. can already earn.