Oregon and Coinbase both ask to pause the 31-token case to 2027

On September 16, 2026, the State of Oregon and Coinbase signed a joint motion requesting the court for six additional months without litigation: document 63 of docket 3:25-cv-00952, "State of Oregon v. Coinbase, Inc.," asks to stay the case until March 16, 2027. This is the fourth consecutive freeze and the first to double the timeframe —the three previous ones were for three months each— and the only written justification is that the CLARITY Act "remains pending in Congress." The motion was filed one day after that law failed a cloture vote in the Senate by 49 votes to 50, and it is not mentioned within its four pages. While the docket waits, six of the 31 tokens that Oregon labels as unregistered securities —ADA, ALGO, AVAX, LINK, SOL, and XRP— appear by name as examples of a digital commodity in the joint publication by the SEC and the CFTC in the Federal Register; that is, as an asset that is not a security under federal law. These six tokens move 354.71 million dollars a day in Coinbase dollar pairs, representing 76.9% of the volume moved by the 23 tokens from the case still listed there, based on the daily average for the 30 days ending October 2, 2026. This article explores the four stays in the case, the reason why a federal magistrate wrote, in a recommendation that remains unresolved, that Oregon is not required to use the same test as the federal government, and which part of the clash would be resolved by the law that the Senate just stalled.

What did the State of Oregon and Coinbase request on September 16, 2026?

The lawsuit was filed by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield on April 18, 2025, in the Multnomah County Circuit Court. The allegation is singular: that Coinbase "has for years operated an illegal securities business in Oregon" by selling crypto assets to state residents that should have been registered as securities under the Oregon Securities Law. The original 172-page complaint dedicates a specific section to each of 31 cryptocurrencies; the amended complaint governing the litigation (document 18, dated July 2, 2025) spans 168 pages and lists the same 31. Coinbase moved the lawsuit to federal court on June 2, 2025, and Oregon requested on July 2 that it be remanded to state court.

The date of the lawsuit is not accidental. Seven weeks earlier, on February 27, 2025, the SEC had announced that it was filing a joint stipulation with Coinbase to dismiss its own civil action against the company, stating that the withdrawal was due to its intention to reform its regulatory approach to the sector "and not to any assessment of the merits of the claims alleged." The federal case that was to decide whether those sales were securities sales was closed without a decision. The Oregon case, which poses the same question under a different law, remained standing.

Since December 15, 2025, this lawsuit has not progressed, and it remains stalled because both parties have requested it together. Document 50 was a joint stipulation for a stay (in the case file, stay: the formal freezing of the proceedings, which pauses deadlines until a specific date). This was followed by three more joint motions in March, June, and September 2026. All four were signed simultaneously by Coinbase's lawyers —Stoel Rives in Portland and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York— and those representing Oregon: the state's Department of Justice, Keller Rohrback, and Cohen Milstein.

What changes in the fourth one is the duration. Document 63 states, literally, that the parties "jointly request to extend the stay for six months, until March 16, 2027," and cites as cause that "proposed federal legislation known as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act remains pending in Congress" and "contains provisions that may displace the application of certain state laws to certain digital assets." It adds the usual formula regarding judicial economy and concludes by requesting time "for Congress to continue considering the proposed legislation."

The docket records a calendar entry on September 17, 2026, with no associated document. We have not purchased it on PACER, so in this article, the March 16, 2027 deadline refers to what the parties are requesting, not what the court has ruled. What is documented is the previous pattern: the three prior extensions were granted on the same day as the request or the following day.

The March 16, 2026, entry has two records because two filings were submitted that day. The first alleged the CLARITY Act; the second, amended that same day, deleted that paragraph and cited only judicial economy. It is the only one of the three extensions whose current document does not name the law; the December 2025 stipulation did not name it either, and claimed to conserve judicial and State resources. The June and September filings name it again: two of the four freezes were requested in writing on behalf of the CLARITY Act and two were not. There is also a date discrepancy between two documents in the same file: document 63 states that the June motion was filed on June 16, 2026, while the list of entries dates it on the 15th.

Why did Magistrate Russo write that Oregon is not bound by the Howey test?

The piece of the file that explains everything else is dated September 12, 2025. It is document 46, Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo's recommendation on whether the case should remain in federal court or return to Multnomah. Her conclusion is that it should return. The reasoning is what turns this lawsuit into something more than just state litigation.

Coinbase had argued that the central question — whether crypto-asset transactions on its platform are "investment contracts" and therefore securities — is answered by federal law, because Oregon evaluates investment contracts using the test established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1946 Howey case. If the question is federal, the forum must be federal. It is a clean argument with only one catch: Oregon does not use exactly that test.

Russo develops this using state case law. In Pratt v. Kross (1976), the Oregon Supreme Court declared that the Howey definition was too restrictive for the protective purposes of state law and adopted a modified version. Five years earlier, in State v. Consumer Bus. Sys., an Oregon appellate court had held that "the Howey test is not exclusive" and that the "risk capital" test must also be applied. The sentence in the recommendation summarizing the effect is this: "a financial product may be an investment contract under Pratt and not be one under Howey."

From this stems the jurisdictional conclusion —the federal question is not "necessarily raised," the first requirement of the Grable standard, which allows a federal court to hear a state claim when it depends on resolving a question of federal law, so there is no federal jurisdiction— and from this also stems the other phrase that has followed the lawsuit ever since: "state and federal securities regulation can coexist." Russo adds, in denying Oregon attorney fees, that "cryptocurrency litigation, especially regarding state Blue Sky laws, is an emerging area of law that few courts have had the occasion to address."

If that recommendation is confirmed, the double label ceases to be a contradiction that a federal judge can undo. A token may not be a security under the federal test and yet be an investment contract under the Oregon test without either reading being incorrect, because they are two different laws with two different tests. A federal court applying Howey would not resolve the Oregon question; this is why Russo recommends remanding the case. The only thing that would close the gap is an act of Congress stating which rule prevails. That is exactly what both parties write they are waiting for.

How many of the 31 tokens in the file does the Federal Register name as a digital commodity?

On March 23, 2026, the interpretation regarding the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets came into effect, published in volume 91 of the Federal Register starting on page 13714. It is signed by two agencies with distinct roles, and precision is necessary: the SEC issues the interpretation and the CFTC issues, in the same publication, the guidance related to that interpretation. Section III.A defines a digital commodity as a crypto asset whose value derives from the programmatic operation of a system that is already functional and from supply and demand, rather than from the expectation of profits through the management efforts of others. It also provides examples with names and tickers.

The body of the text lists sixteen: Aptos, Avalanche, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, Chainlink, Dogecoin, Ether, Hedera, Litecoin, Polkadot, Shiba Inu, Solana, Stellar, Tezos, and XRP. Footnote 51 adds two more —Algorand and LBRY Credits— specifying that neither underlies a futures contract listed on a CFTC-designated market and that, even so, they are digital commodities. Eighteen in total. Our March analysis of the SEC and CFTC five-category taxonomy dated the text on the 17th and counted the sixteen from the body; the 23rd we use here is the date of publication and entry into force in the Federal Register, and the two in the note are those missing to reach eighteen. One of them, Algorand, is precisely one of the 31 from Oregon.

Cross-referencing that list of eighteen with the index from the amended Oregon complaint reveals six matches: ADA, ALGO, AVAX, LINK, SOL, and XRP. The other twenty-five tokens in the filing are not mentioned in the interpretation. Their absence does not mean the agencies consider them securities; the publication merely provides examples. The publication itself warns that there may be crypto assets that do not fit into any of its five categories.

There is a nuance that limits all of the above. The federal interpretation does not state that selling one of those six cannot be part of an investment contract. It states, in footnote 47, that the fact that a crypto asset which is not a security is subject to an investment contract "does not transform the crypto asset itself into a security." The Oregon lawsuit hinges on this distinction: its sole claim is directed at sales made on the platform to residents of the state.

How much volume do the six tokens that the SEC and the CFTC call commodities move on Coinbase?

To measure the weight of those six, on October 2, 2026, we consulted the public product statistics endpoint of Coinbase Exchange, one by one, for the 31 tokens in the lawsuit, and we did so twice with a half-hour interval to rule out any figure falling within a fleeting movement. The two readings match within a tenth in both shares; the figures we provide are from the second one. The documentation describes the volume field with a literal label: "the volume property is in units of the base currency." It does not state whether the 24-hour window is rolling or a calendar day, so we verified it: for SOL-USD, that volume nearly doubled that of the current calendar day candle, and the returned minimum did not correspond to any daily candle. The window is rolling, a check performed on September 30 that remains valid. The conversion to dollars —volume multiplied by the last price of the pair against the dollar— is our own calculation, as is the thirty-day daily average.

Twenty-three of the 31 tokens in the file have an active dollar pair on Coinbase. The remaining eight —DDX, EOS, MATIC, MIR, MKR, RLY, VGX, and wLUNA— return a delisted status and disabled trading across all their pairs. Of those eight, two have a living successor: MATIC and MKR are no longer listed because their projects migrated to POL and SKY, which remain active in the catalog read on October 2, 2026. All eight count as zero in the distribution. This bias pushes the share of the six upwards.

The six tokens named as digital commodities by the SEC and the CFTC move 354.71 million dollars a day in Coinbase dollar pairs, out of the 461.07 million moved by the 23 tokens from the Oregon file with an active pair, based on the daily average for the thirty days ending October 2, 2026. They represent 76.9%. The other seventeen tokens with an active pair share the remaining 106.36 million, or 23.1%, and three-quarters of that figure is contributed by two that the federal publication does not name: NEAR with 55.90 million and UNI with 23.59.

The 24-hour rolling snapshot for October 2 shows 351.15 million dollars out of 457.35 million — 76.8%, just a tenth away from the thirty-day average. They do not always stay so close: on September 30, that same window showed 72.9%, and on September 25, 77.4%. In the three 24-hour readings we have taken, the share of the six fluctuates between 72.9% and 77.4%, while the thirty-day average, which smooths out individual days, places it at 76.9%. Furthermore, including pairs against USDT, euro, pound, Bitcoin, Ether, and rupee, those six move 368.01 million dollars in 24 hours.

The portion of the Oregon case that remains commercially viable is, for the most part, what the federal government has already stated in writing is not a security under federal law. The 30 trading pairs for those six remain active on Coinbase.

What would the CLARITY Act do to the Oregon lawsuit if the Senate passed it?

The short answer is that it would change the rule they can invoke, not their ability to sue. The text handled by the Senate on September 15, 2026 — the 635-page substitute amendment released by the office of Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) — does both things at once, and it is worth looking at them separately because they are circulating in summary as if they were one and the same. One of them describes the Oregon case with such precision that it deserves a lengthy quote.

• What reaches a lawsuit like the one in Oregon. Section 10102 of the amendment adds a new Section 4B to the Securities Act of 1933. Its subsection (b)(3)(A) establishes that the offer, sale, or distribution of a network token (a digital asset linked to a distributed ledger and treated as a non-security for the purposes of securities laws, according to the amendment's own definition) by any person "shall be treated as not involving the offer, sale, or distribution of a security" for the purposes of, among other rules, "any applicable requirement of State law that is functionally equivalent" to the federal provisions it lists, "including any provision of State law that directly or indirectly prohibits, limits, or imposes conditions on the use, offer, sale, transfer, or disposal of a network token" in a manner that "is not substantially similar" to how that same state applies to assets that are commodities under its own law. A state law functionally equivalent to federal securities law, applied to secondary market sales, and treating those tokens differently than how the state treats its commodities: it is the description of the Oregon lawsuit without naming it.
• The limit of that rule. Subsection 4B(b)(3)(B) itself excludes network tokens offered, sold, or distributed as part of a security offering by the asset originator or its underwriter. And Section 20109(a) adds, through another channel, that the CFTC shall have "exclusive jurisdiction" over any person registered under that division, "notwithstanding any other provision of law."
• What remains. Section 20109(b) expressly preserves a state's ability to investigate and sue a registered person for fraud, deceit, or manipulation under the Commodity Exchange Act, and any unregistered person for violations of state laws of general applicability: fraud, unfair or deceptive practices, consumer protection, banking, payments, property, contracts, and criminal law. The list is long and does not include securities registration.
• What it opens. Section 20204(b) places digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers within the article of the Commodity Exchange Act that enables state lawsuits, and Section 20104 allows states to continue licensing these intermediaries as long as the CFTC has not adopted its rules.

That is the trade-off facing both parties in the Oregon lawsuit. For Coinbase, the law would replace an allegation of selling unregistered securities in Oregon with a federal registration regime. For Oregon, the shift would mean litigating under the Commodity Exchange Act, with a different standard of proof and a different catalog of remedies, instead of under the Oregon Securities Law. The fact that neither side is in a hurry to find out which of the two regimes applies explains better than anything else why both have signed the same petition four times in a row.

It is advisable not to strike a tone stronger than that of the documents themselves. None of these sections are cited in the joint motion of September 16, which merely states that the law "contains provisions that may displace the application of certain state laws to certain digital assets." The conditional tense belongs to the brief signed by both parties, and none of these pages constitute current law: they are the text that never reached the floor for debate.

The September 15, 2026, vote did not reject the law: it rejected closing the debate. Cloture requires 60 out of 100 senators and failed 49 to 50, with the nominal breakdown in our roll call of that vote. Since then, there has been no recorded roll call vote in the Senate on H.R. 3633: the twenty-two votes following the one on September 15, up to the last one recorded on September 30, 2026, were on other matters. Senator Thom Tillis's (R-NC) motion for reconsideration remains unvoted. With the electoral recess approaching, the next window is the session starting November 9, 2026, and the deadline requested by the parties, March 2027, covers it.

Why did Coinbase take the Oregon case to federal court and what is the U.S. Marshals Service's involvement?

Coinbase alleged two pathways to remove the case from Multnomah. The first is the one Russo dismantles with Pratt. The second is rarer and much less discussed: the "federal officer" removal, a mechanism that allows a private party to move a state lawsuit to federal court when they were acting under the instructions of the United States government.

The foundation is Coinbase's contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, the agency that manages the federal asset forfeiture program. According to Coinbase's withdrawal brief, cited in Russo's recommendation, "under its agreement with the USMS, Coinbase has executed more than half a million sales of federal crypto assets, including sales of more than half of the crypto assets identified by the attorney general in this action." The consequence Coinbase drew is direct: if Oregon wins, Coinbase would be disqualified from selling digital assets in Oregon on behalf of the United States government.

Russo rejects this path due to a lack of causal nexus, and the reason is an Oregon procedural decision that deserves to be noted. The amended complaint expressly excludes, waives, and releases any claims related to Coinbase's contractual relationship with the USMS. Furthermore, state law itself exempts these operations: the rule prohibiting the sale of unregistered securities in Oregon does not extend to sales made by a marshal. Oregon sidestepped the federal argument by sidestepping federal sales, and the recommendation accepts this by citing the rule that the plaintiff is the master of their complaint.

There remains a third claim by Coinbase in the record that the court has not yet assessed: that for years Oregon published official guidelines stating that digital assets traded on platforms like Coinbase "were not regulated by the State of Oregon." We do not take this as proven or false; it stands as a defense alleged by Coinbase under the federal due process clause, and its assessment depends on the merits of the lawsuit, which is precisely what has been frozen since December 2025.

What is missing from the Oregon v. Coinbase case file as of October 2, 2026?

The case file for this matter is not fully available to the public, which limits what can be stated about it. The RECAP public archive does not independently query the federal court payment system; it reflects what has been purchased and uploaded by users. Its last query for this file is dated September 17, 2026, which is also the date of the last entry shown: the fifteen days from September 17 to October 2, 2026, are not covered by this reading. Furthermore, on October 2, we verified two things that can be checked without a payment account: the archive's public search engine returns the calendar entry from September 17 as the last entry for this file, and its repository responds "does not exist" when document 64 is requested.

With that stated limitation, what is not recorded is the following:

• There is no record of a written resolution regarding the September 16 petition. There is a calendar entry from the following day, but no downloadable document. None of the dates or figures mentioned above depend on its content.
• There is no record of any motion to lift the stay by either Oregon or Coinbase.
• There is no record that Judge Karin J. Immergut, the presiding judge in the district court, has ruled on the objections to the recommendation for remand. On January 2, 2026, she declared them moot for the duration of the stay, referred the matter back to Magistrate Judge Russo for case management, and gave the parties seven days from the expiration of the stay to renew them.
• There is no record of a response to Coinbase's motion to dismiss, filed on August 1, 2025: the deadline to respond begins fourteen days after the remand to state court is definitively resolved, which remains pending.

Any of the first three would change the picture, and the third would change it entirely: if Immergut resolves the objections and returns the case to Multnomah, the lawsuit ceases to depend on the Senate calendar and instead depends on an Oregon state judge applying Pratt. All four are verified in the same file, at no cost, except for the update gap already explained.

What exactly does the Oregon lawsuit demand, and what are the upcoming dates?

The amended lawsuit contains a single claim for violation of the Oregon Securities Law and seeks five specific actions against Coinbase: a permanent injunction prohibiting it from selling or brokering the sale of these cryptoassets to Oregon residents; restitution or damages for the affected residents; disgorgement of profits obtained from those sales; a fine of 20,000 dollars for each violation; and the state's attorney fees. The lawsuit invokes ORS 59,055 and ORS 59.115, and explains why the attorney general is litigating instead of the buyers: it states that Coinbase has for years included arbitration and class-action waiver clauses in its platform terms, which would make individual claims impracticable.

There is no resolution on any of those five petitions. Nor is there one regarding Coinbase's motion to dismiss, or the remand to state court. This article does not state what effect any of these would have on those who purchased these tokens: that depends on a fund that no judge has yet assessed, and the only existing ruling is the recommendation for restitution, which remains unresolved.

What is indeed dated is the calendar. March 16, 2027, is the deadline requested by the parties; if they submit a fifth joint petition on that day, the written reasoning will state whether the lawsuit remains tied to Congress. Before that, there are two legislative milestones: the session starting on November 9, 2026, and its conclusion in early January 2027. And there are two documents that anyone can read today without intermediaries: section III.A and note 51 of the March 23, 2026, publication, which name those six tokens among the eighteen examples of digital commodities, and the index of the amended complaint, which names them among the 31 whose sale Oregon considers a sale of unregistered securities. Both remain in effect simultaneously, and neither nullifies the other.

This coexistence is what the case leaves behind beyond Oregon. The fact that a federal regulator declares that a token is not a security leaves the question open in a country with fifty state securities laws: Oregon has had its own test since 1976, and New York, California, and Texas have their own. The only written path to unify them, section 4B of the September amendment, remains unvoted two and a half weeks after cloture failed; the next opportunity opens on November 9, 2026.

Sources and links: Docket 3:25-cv-00952 (D. Or.) on CourtListener/RECAP · Doc. 63, joint motion of 16-sep-2026 · Doc. 46, Magistrate Judge Russo's recommendation · Doc. 1-1, Oregon lawsuit featuring the 31 tokens · 91 FR 13714, SEC interpretation and CFTC guidance · Oregon Department of Justice release · SEC, dismissal of its case against Coinbase · Coinbase Exchange public API