Coinbase Europe Limited has accepted the fine of €21,464,734 after admitting that it failed to fully and properly monitors tens of thousands of transactions between 2021 and 2025.

Coinbase Europe, which is part of the Coinbase Group, provides crypto asset and wallet services to customers globally to facilitate their use of the Coinbase Group’s trading platform to buy and sell crypto assets.

As a virtual asset service provider, Coinbase Europe is required to monitor customer transactions on an ongoing basis.

Where Coinbase Europe suspects that a transaction is facilitating money laundering or terrorist financing it is required to file a suspicious transaction report (STR) with the national Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and Revenue Commissioners as soon as possible.

Coinbase Europe has been fined due to faults in the configuration of their transaction monitoring system, which resulted in more than 30 million transactions not being properly monitored over a 12-month period.

The value of these transactions amounted to over €176 billion, and accounted for approximately 31 per cent of all Coinbase Europe transactions conducted in the period when the faults existed. 

Further, it took Coinbase Europe almost three years to fully complete the monitoring of the impacted transactions. This subsequent monitoring led to the reporting of 2,708 STRs to the FIU for further analysis and potential investigation.

The STRs submitted in respect of the late monitoring of the transactions contained suspicions associated with serious criminal activities including: money laundering; fraud/scams; drug trafficking; cyber-attacks (malware/ransomware); and child sexual exploitation.

The monitoring of transactions in real time and the filing of STRs without delay is a cornerstone of the effectiveness and efficiency of the AML/CFT regulatory regime. Failure to do so can seriously hinder how the regulatory and criminal justice system can detect, report, disrupt, investigate and prosecute criminality.  

Coinbase Europe has accepted that it breached its transaction monitoring obligations under the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010.

It has admitted failing to fully and properly monitor 30,442,437 transactions; adopt internal policies, controls and procedures to prevent and detect the commission of money laundering and terrorist financing; and conduct additional monitoring in respect of 184,790 transactions.

A penalty of nearly €30.7 million was discounted to €21.4 million through the Central Bank’s settlement scheme.

The sanctions have been accepted by Coinbase Europe and are now subject to confirmation by the High Court.

Colm Kincaid, the Central Bank’s deputy governor for consumer and investor protection, said: “To be effective in combatting financial crime, law enforcement agencies rely on regulated financial institutions to have systems in place to monitor transactions and report suspicions.

“The failure of such a system within any financial institution creates an opportunity for criminals to evade detection — and criminals will take that opportunity.

“Crypto has particular technological features which, together with its anonymity-enhancing capabilities and cross-border nature, makes it especially attractive to criminals looking to move their funds.

“This is why it is especially important that firms engaged in crypto services have robust controls in place to identify and report suspicious transactions.

“Where system failures do occur, it is imperative that they are reported to the Central Bank without delay so that appropriate actions can be taken to manage and mitigate the risk.”