The Central Bank of Ireland imposed a €21,464,734 fine on Coinbase Europe Limited, the European arm of Coinbase Global, Inc., for failures in its transaction‑monitoring system that left more than 30 million customer transactions unscreened for suspicious activity between April 2021 and March 2025. The settlement, reached on November 5 2025, was reduced from an initial €30.66 million by a 30 % discount, reflecting the regulator’s willingness to accept remediation efforts.
The coding errors that triggered the breach affected five of the 21 monitoring scenarios in Coinbase’s Transaction Monitoring System. As a result, transactions totaling over €176 billion—about 31 % of Coinbase Europe’s volume during the period—were not flagged. In a retrospective review completed in March 2025, the company filed roughly 2,700 suspicious‑transaction reports covering €13 million, with allegations ranging from money laundering and fraud to drug trafficking, cyber‑attacks, and child sexual exploitation. The regulator could not confirm whether any of these transactions ultimately involved criminal activity.
This fine marks the Central Bank of Ireland’s first enforcement action against a crypto firm and is the fourth‑largest penalty ever imposed by the regulator. It underscores a growing trend of regulatory scrutiny in the cryptocurrency sector, particularly around anti‑money‑laundering and counter‑terrorist‑financing obligations. The action signals that regulators are willing to impose significant penalties for systemic compliance failures, even when the fines represent a small fraction of a company’s overall revenue.
From a business perspective, the €21.5 million penalty is modest relative to Coinbase’s financial scale—its Q2 2025 revenue was $1.5 billion and its 2024 annual revenue was $6.564 billion. Nevertheless, the fine is likely to prompt additional investment in compliance technology and oversight, and it may affect the company’s standing with institutional clients and regulators. The fine does not indicate a fundamental threat to Coinbase’s business model or financial stability, but it does highlight the importance of robust monitoring systems in a highly regulated environment.
Coinbase’s management acknowledged the coding errors and outlined a remediation plan that includes enhancing the Transaction Monitoring System, improving pre‑deployment testing, and building new monitoring scenarios to detect high‑risk activity. The company also stated that it will continue to work closely with regulators to ensure ongoing compliance and to prevent recurrence of similar failures.
While the fact‑check report does not provide specific market‑reaction data for this fine, the broader context suggests that investors and regulators are paying close attention to compliance risks in the crypto industry. The fine serves as a reminder that regulatory enforcement can have reputational and operational implications, even when the monetary penalty is relatively small compared to a company’s overall revenue.
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