The Central Bank of Ireland has fined Coinbase Europe Limited €21,464,734 for breaking anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules from 2021 to 2025
The fine came after an investigation showed that Coinbase failed to properly check millions of customer transactions, as required by Irish law. The case was settled on November 5, 2025, when Coinbase agreed to the findings and accepted the penalty.
However, the regulator said the company’s monitoring system had faults that left over 30 million transactions unchecked for a full year. These transactions were worth more than €176 billion and made up about one-third of Coinbase Europe’s total activity during that time.
Due to this error, Coinbase took almost three years to review the missed transactions and later filed 2,708 suspicious reports with Ireland’s Financial Intelligence Unit. The late reports showed possible crimes like money laundering, fraud, drug trafficking, cyberattacks, and child exploitation.
According to the Central Bank, Coinbase failed to keep proper systems and internal checks to prevent and detect financial crimes. The company did not fully monitor 30,442,437 transactions and missed extra checks on nearly 185,000 others. The original fine was set at €30.66 million but was reduced by 30% after a settlement agreement. The fine still needs to be confirmed by Ireland’s High Court before taking effect.
Meanwhile, Colm Kincaid, Deputy Governor for Consumer and Investor Protection, said strong controls are essential to protect the financial system. He noted that when monitoring systems fail, criminals can slip through undetected. “Crypto has special features that make it attractive to criminals,” he said.
“That’s why firms offering crypto services must have strong controls to find and report suspicious transactions,” Kincaid added that any system failures should be reported quickly so that risks can be reduced.
Notably, this is not Coinbase’s first penalty. In 2023, it was fined 1 million rubles in Russia for failing to store user data locally. In 2024, the UK’s financial regulator also fined Coinbase’s CB Payments Limited for taking on high-risk customers in violation of Financial Crime Controls.
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