The Central Bank of Ireland has fined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase €21.5 million for failing to properly monitor transactions, including activity potentially linked to child sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes.
The regulator said Coinbase’s European entity failed to monitor more than 30-million transactions worth over €176 billion, accounting for roughly 31% of its total activity during the period when its systems were faulty. Approximately €13 million of those unmonitored transactions were suspected of ties to criminal activity, though the central bank said it “cannot say” whether any led to offences.
The shortcomings spanned from April 23, 2021 to March 19, 2025, and Irish officials said it took Coinbase’s European arm almost three years to fully complete monitoring of the impacted transactions. The subsequent monitoring led to the filing of 2,708 suspicious transaction reports in need of further investigation, the bank said.
Coinbase said it had “inadvertently made three coding errors” in building its monitoring system, leaving some 2021–2022 transactions incompletely screened, according to a report by the Financial Times. One bug mishandled special characters such as “&” in wallet addresses, the newspaper said.
The bank said Coinbase intends to transfer the business of Coinbase Europe to a group entity in Luxembourg, and that the Irish unit will cease conducting business at year-end, the FT said.
Read more at the Central Bank of Ireland
Read more at the Financial Times