Coinbase Europe will pay €21.5 million to Ireland’s Central Bank after software errors caused gaps in transaction monitoring from 2021 to 2022;
Coding flaws led Coinbase to miss checks on some crypto transfers; the firm later fixed the issue and filed 2,700 AML reports;
The fine was based on Coinbase’s Irish revenue, with €202 billion in transactions reviewed, around 31% of its total volume in that period.
The European branch of US-based crypto exchange Coinbase $2.26B, Coinbase Europe Limited, has agreed to pay €21.5 million (around $24.7 million) to the Central Bank of Ireland.
This follows issues with how the company monitored certain transactions from 2021 to 2022.
According to a blog post published on November 6, the issue came from mistakes in Coinbase’s software. These errors caused the system to miss parts of some transactions when checking for unusual or suspicious activity.
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Coinbase found the problem during regular internal checks. The company fixed the system within a few weeks and later reviewed all transactions that might have been affected.
Coinbase examined 185,000 transactions and filed 2,700 reports of suspicious activity, which totaled around $15 million. The reports did not confirm that any illegal activity occurred, but Coinbase filed them to meet Ireland’s anti-money laundering rules.
The Central Bank based the fine on Coinbase’s average annual income in Ireland from 2021 to 2024, estimated at $480 million.
As a registered crypto service provider, Coinbase is required to monitor for possible money laundering and report any risks. The monitoring failure occurred due to three coding errors across five of the 21 checks the company uses.
Recently, Coinbase responded to criticism from a US banking group seeking to stop the company’s efforts to obtain a federal trust charter.
