UPDATED 19:51 UTC, 22 Oct. Coinbase has responded. In a statement published in full by FX News Group, it said Coinbase Ireland self-reported many of the issues to the central bank in January 2024 and has since fixed them, and that “no customer suffered any financial loss as a result of these matters, and no customer was ever unable to access their funds.” Coinbase said that when Silvergate Bank was at risk of failure in 2023, it told 30 customers to deposit US dollars into a Coinbase, Inc. account at another US bank, which mixed their money with funds of another Coinbase entity, and that coding errors left the safeguarding account underfunded by about 0.54% of its total safeguarding obligation on average in 2023 and the first half of 2024. It said it has added a €25 million guaranty bond and a dedicated head of safeguarding, and that its European headquarters has since moved to Luxembourg. Coinbase Ireland’s statement was also reported by RTÉ.
At a glance
- The Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase Ireland Limited €3,252,618 for breaching safeguarding and outsourcing rules for e-money between 1 Nov 2020 and 19 Aug 2025, the regulator said on Thursday.
- Coinbase Ireland admitted the breaches and accepted the sanctions, which take effect once the High Court confirms them, according to the central bank.
Coinbase Ireland, the group’s e-money institution for European customers, was fined and reprimanded under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 after a settlement reached on 21 Oct, the central bank said.
The penalty was set at €4,646,597 and cut by 30% under the bank’s settlement scheme, according to the release. The maximum the regulator could have imposed in this case was €10 million, its settlement notice shows.
What went wrong
The central bank found that Coinbase Ireland relied too heavily on the US-based Coinbase Group to run its safeguarding processes and lacked local staff with the skills to oversee them.
A data change made in July 2022 caused the account that holds customer money to be underfunded until October 2024, according to the notice. The shortfall appeared every day from 1 Jan 2023 to 27 Jun 2024. The largest daily gap was €3.4 million in 2023 and €5.2 million the following year, when the sums it had to safeguard averaged €323 million and €470 million respectively.
About 30 institutional clients were told for roughly 19 months to send US dollars to accounts in the name of Coinbase Inc., not Coinbase Ireland, the notice says. After Brexit, some of the 6.3 million customers moved from Coinbase UK kept paying into a Coinbase UK account until deposits there were blocked on 19 Aug 2025.
The regulator said there was no evidence that customers actually lost money, but that they could have if the firm had become insolvent.
What the regulator said
“The Central Bank has made its supervisory expectations in this regard clear: we have no tolerance for weaknesses in safeguarding arrangements,” Karen O’Leary, its director of enforcement, said in the release.
She added that failing to keep to assurances given during authorisation, or to report material changes, “is completely unacceptable.”
Context
This is the second Irish fine for the unit. In November 2025 the central bank fined Coinbase Ireland €21.5 million over transaction-monitoring failures under anti-money-laundering rules, RTÉ reported. This week Coinbase was also named in a Kazakh court order naming Coinbase among six unlicensed platforms, as CryptoWatchDesk reported on 20 Oct.
The case concerns e-money rules, which sit alongside the EU’s separate crypto-asset regime, MiCA. CryptoWatchDesk found no public comment from Coinbase on the fine by 13:55 UTC.
The sanctions take effect once the High Court confirms them.
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This article is for information only and is not investment advice.