Coinbase Ireland Admits Breaches, Takes $3.64 Million Penalty Over Underfunded Customer Account

Coinbase Ireland Limited, the exchange’s Irish e-money unit, has admitted breaching rules meant to protect customer cash and accepted a €3,252,618 fine (about $3.64 million at current exchange rates) plus a reprimand from the Central Bank of Ireland, the regulator announced on Thursday.

The regulator set the penalty at €4,646,597 (about $5.21 million) before cutting it by 30%, the cap on discounts under its settlement scheme. The sanctions take effect only once Ireland’s High Court confirms them. According to the settlement notice, the breaches of the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 ran from Nov. 1, 2020, to Aug. 19, 2025.

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The Central Bank said Coinbase Ireland leaned too heavily on its U.S. parent group to run safeguarding processes and lacked enough in-house expertise to supervise them.

The notice details how customer money ended up in the wrong places. As Silvergate and Signature Bank collapsed in March 2023, the Irish unit directed 30 institutional clients to wire U.S. dollars to Coinbase Inc. accounts, first at Signature and then at Cross River Bank, rather than to an account in its own name. Their money stayed mixed with Coinbase Inc.’s funds for about 19 months. Separately, some users who moved over from Coinbase UK after Brexit kept depositing into a UK account, a problem that lasted almost five years.

Calculation errors also left the unit’s designated safeguarding account short every day for at least 18 months, with the daily gap peaking at €5.2 million (about $5.8 million) in 2024. Had the firm become insolvent during that stretch, users “may not have been able to promptly and fully regain their funds,” the notice said.

Karen O’Leary, the Central Bank’s director of enforcement, said in the release that “we have no tolerance for weaknesses in safeguarding arrangements.” She added that breaking commitments made during authorisation, or failing to report material changes, “is completely unacceptable.”

Coinbase Ireland said in a statement that it caught several of the problems on its own, flagged them to the Central Bank in January 2024 and has fixed them since. The company said “no customers suffered financial loss or were unable to access their funds as a result” and that the problems “largely arose in the context of Coinbase taking steps to protect customers during periods of significant disruption,” including the 2023 U.S. banking crisis.

Coinbase Europe Limited, another company in the group, was fined €21,464,734 (about $24.1 million at today’s rate) by the same regulator in November 2025, over failures in monitoring transactions for money laundering from April 23, 2021, to March 19, 2025.

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