Key Highlights
- Coinbase settled with the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) for €21.5 million over three technical coding errors in its TMS.
- The errors caused five of 21 scenarios to only partially screen certain crypto addresses and transactions between 2021 and 2022.
- Coinbase immediately fixed the errors and enhanced TMS testing and oversight to prevent future technical failures.
Coinbase has acknowledged the €21,464,734, around $24 million, fine from the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI), saying the issue stemmed from technical coding errors in its Transaction Monitoring System (TMS) between 2021 and 2022.
In a statement, the company said its Irish arm, Coinbase Europe Limited (CBEL), cooperated fully with regulators and identified the bug itself before fixing it.
The firm explained that the errors caused five out of 21 TMS scenarios used to screen customer transactions, causing certain crypto addresses, such as those separated by special characters, to be only partially monitored.
The Central Bank of Ireland had fined Coinbase Europe after finding that the company failed to properly monitor over 30 million transactions worth about €176 billion between 2021 and 2022. Regulators said the lapses represented serious breaches of anti-money laundering (AML) obligations and left a large share of Coinbase Europe’s activity insufficiently checked for potential criminal risk.
Coinbase tightens compliance after error
Once identified, Coinbase shared that it fixed the issue within weeks and re-ran all affected transactions through the corrected TMS.
During that period, CBEL processed about 97 million crypto transactions. The review flagged some 185,000 transactions for further checks, of which about 2,700 went on to be the subject of suspicious transaction reports to Irish authorities. These had a total value of around €13 million.
Both the regulator and Coinbase noted that filing a suspicious transaction report doesn’t necessarily mean any wrongdoing took place. Such reports are filed whenever there’s a reasonable basis for concern, as required by law.
Coinbase said it has since tightened its compliance checks—improving how its Transaction Monitoring System is tested before any code changes, increasing oversight, and adding new tools to spot emerging risks.
The company said these steps aim to ensure that similar errors don’t happen again, and it “recognizes the importance of effective AML procedures and takes our obligations under AML legislation and regulatory guidance very seriously.”
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