Coinbase Settles $24.7M Fine with Ireland Over Transaction Monitoring Failures
The post Coinbase Settles $24.7M Fine with Ireland Over Transaction Monitoring Failures appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
The Central Bank of Ireland has imposed a €21.46 million ($24.7 million) fine on Coinbase Europe Limited for failing to properly monitor millions of cryptocurrency transactions between April 2021 and March 2025. This marks Ireland’s first enforcement action against a crypto company and represents one of the largest penalties ever issued by the Irish financial regulator. The Scale of the Problem Coinbase Europe’s transaction monitoring system had serious flaws that left over 30 million transactions unmonitored during a 12-month period. These transactions were worth more than €176 billion ($202 billion), representing about 31% of all the company’s European activity during that time. The Central Bank of Ireland announced the settlement on November 6, 2025. The original penalty was set at €30.66 million, but Coinbase received a 30% discount for admitting to the violations and cooperating with regulators. According to the settlement agreement, Coinbase Europe admitted to three main failures: not properly monitoring over 30.4 million transactions, lacking adequate internal controls to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, and failing to conduct additional monitoring on 184,790 specific transactions. What Went Wrong The problems stemmed from coding errors in Coinbase’s Transaction Monitoring System (TMS). This software is designed to analyze financial transactions and flag suspicious patterns that compliance teams need to investigate. Coinbase built 21 different monitoring “scenarios” to catch potential red flags. However, three coding mistakes caused five of these 21 scenarios to miss certain transactions. The system overlooked cryptocurrency addresses that were separated by special characters. Source: centralbank.ie These errors didn’t affect the other 16 monitoring scenarios or Coinbase’s other compliance controls. The company discovered the bugs through its own internal testing and fixed them by the end of April 2022. However, reviewing all the affected transactions took much longer—nearly three years to complete, with the final transactions reviewed in…
