I would guess just having a lot of blockchain experts on staff, and since the blockchain is pretty much an open, unencrypted, public ledger; analyzing it is a pretty natural and not entirely unethical thing to do.

I think the issue is really just working with ICE, and the ethical concerns that brings up.

It sounds like they mostly acquired it, see:

https://blog.coinbase.com/living-up-to-our-values-and-the-ne...

First, begs the question does not mean raises the question. You mean to use the latter.

Second, because laws and enforcement thereof in the USA are arbitrary and wielded as a weapon. Coinbase is a crypto company who would get absolutely obliterated by regulation and legal hassle if they don't play ball with the federal government - on the latter's terms, of course. The US federal government expects complete and total dragnet suspicionless surveillance of all electronic payments in the USA. Anyone doing payments in the USA is expected to cooperate fully or face destruction.

The idea that you're free to do anything in the US that isn't illegal is an illusion. Get big or important enough and what you are doing will be made illegal (or existing laws will be reinterpreted to apply to you) if you don't play ball with TPTB. See also: FISA section 702.

The same sort of pressure is applied to Apple, which is why they maintain a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for the FBI. No amount of money or commercial success allows you to bypass these power structures.

Yes, to me this would be a better addition to the article, explain the tool real goal.

Now... you need metrics and analytics over what’s going on with your products. This sounds like something that helps address that somehow, staying anonymous from what it looks like (it says it has no identifiable information linked to people), but even the contract linked makes it hard to understand.

I'm guessing this started in good faith as a way to track down money launderers and other nefarious users and naturally ICE caught wind and demanded access as well. Coinbase is proudly apolitical so it has no reason to refuse compliance with an alphabet agency.