Coinbase Europe Fined €21M for Years for Screening Errors

The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) has fined Coinbase Europe Limited (CBEL) €21,464,734 for breaching the anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) laws. The fine is said to be one of the regulator’s biggest penalties against a crypto company.

The settlement, announced Wednesday, November 5, 2025, has also resolved the violations between April 23, 2021, and March 19, 2025, due to coding errors in transaction monitoring systems involved, which had left certain crypto transactions unscreened. 

The Central Bank of Ireland’s initial sanction of €30,663,906 was reduced by 30% due to Coinbase Europe Limited’s admission of the breaches, cooperation, and agreement to settle under the Administrative Sanctions Procedure. 

Following the Central Bank’s recent sanction on Coinbase Europe, its total fines across 162 enforcement cases now exceed €428 million.

Coinbase Admits Fault and Cuts a Deal

The breaches were caused by three coding errors that were introduced between 2021 and 2022 across five of CBEL’s 21 transaction monitoring scenarios. 

These errors had led to failures to properly screen cryptocurrency addresses containing special characters, with over 30.44 million transactions, valued at more than €176 billion, bypassing and escaping monitoring for suspicious activity.

Internal testing by CBEL itself self-detected the issues and fixed them within weeks. Although the delays in completing retrospective reviews extended the breach period to 2025.

The crypto exchange company has also subsequently carried out advance screening on approximately 185,000 higher-risk transactions from the affected batch, filing 2,708 suspicious transaction reports (STRs) with authorities on approximately €15 million in value. However, no confirmed illicit activity was found.

The Central Bank’s fine was calculated based on CBEL’s average annual revenue in Ireland from 2021 to 2024, which Coinbase reported as €417 million. Other violations included insufficient policies, procedures, and untimely reporting of those system failures to the CBI.

€176B in Trades That Slipped Past Coinbase’s Radar

In a statement, Coinbase described the settlement as addressing “past transaction monitoring errors” from 2021 to 2022, emphasizing its quick response and commitment to compliance.

The post-incident improvements include better and strengthened testing before deployment, increased and wider monitoring scenario coverage, and continuous system upgrades to manage emerging risks.

CBEL, which has operated from Dublin since 2018 and has been licensed as an e-money institution since 2019, named Ireland as its EU hub under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation in 2023. The company remains one of only 22 registered virtual asset service providers (VASPs) with the CBI.

This article was originally published as Coinbase Europe Fined €21M for Years for Screening Errors on Crypto Breaking News – your trusted source for crypto news, Bitcoin news, and blockchain updates.