It is named after Coiba, the largest island of Central America, just north of the plate offshore southern Panama.

It was presented together with the newly defined Malpelo plate by Tuo Zhang and lead-researcher Richard G. Gordon et al. of Rice University in a paper published in August 2017.

The slab tear between the microplates could have happened during the fragmentation of the Farallon plate, in the Oligocene, around 30 to 25 Ma.

[3] The researchers led by Gordon used a Columbia University database of multibeam sonar soundings west of Ecuador and Colombia to identify a diffuse plate boundary that runs from the Panama transform fault (PTF) eastward.

[1] Gómez Tapias, Jorge; Montes Ramírez, Nohora E.; Almanza Meléndez, María F.; Alcárcel Gutiérrez, Fernando A.; Madrid Montoya, César A.; Diederix, Hans (2015).