Ireland Fines Coinbase's E-Money Arm €3.25M for Safeguarding Gaps

The Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase's Irish e-money arm €3,252,618 on Thursday and reprimanded it. Coinbase Ireland Limited admitted breaching the safeguarding and outsourcing requirements of Ireland's Electronic Money Regulations between 1 November 2020 and 19 August 2025. The regulator found the firm leaned on its US parent to build the controls that protect customer money, and that the designated account holding that money ran short for lengthy periods. Coinbase Ireland settled on 21 October and accepted the penalty. It does not take effect until the High Court confirms it.

The parent built the controls

The outsourcing finding is the one the Central Bank put first. Coinbase Ireland placed excessive reliance on the US-based Coinbase Group to implement safeguarding processes and controls for Irish and EU compliance, the release said. It also did not keep enough local skill and expertise to oversee the protection of customer funds itself. CoinDesk, reporting the announcement at 15:40 UTC on Thursday, rendered that finding as the regulator describing "excessive reliance on the U.S.-based Coinbase Group as an outsourced service provider." No individual at the firm is named anywhere in the release. The group has been adding European and British permissions across the same years, among them an FCA licence for UK equities and perpetual futures.

An account that kept running short

On safeguarding itself the finding is about design. Inadequate system design and insufficient testing of controls let the designated safeguarding account sit underfunded for lengthy periods, the regulator said. Its release gives no percentage and no dates for that shortfall. CoinDesk does: an average of 0.54% through 2023 and the first half of 2024. That figure appears in no other account read here, and the regulator's own statement does not carry it. The same report is alone in saying that 30 customers were told to move deposits to an alternate account when Silvergate collapsed in 2023, and that euro withdrawals for customers based in the US and the UK were paid out of the Irish safeguarding account.

Coinbase's own version, given to Irish Legal News, points elsewhere. It cites the 2023 US banking crisis, when customers were directed to deposit into Coinbase, Inc. accounts and money mixed with other group entities, and deposits that sat in legacy UK bank accounts. A spokesperson said no customers suffered financial loss or were unable to access their funds. CoinDesk carries a close variant of the same line. The firm also says it self-identified several issues and reported them to the Central Bank in January 2024, a detail that sits in that one account and not in the regulator's release.

"Payment and e-money firms have a fundamental obligation to fully safeguard customers' funds," Karen O'Leary, the Central Bank's director of enforcement, said, adding that "we have no tolerance for weaknesses in safeguarding arrangements."

Two readings of last year's fine

This is the second penalty an Irish regulator has placed on a Coinbase entity inside a year, and the two accounts of the first do not line up. CoinDesk gives Coinbase Europe's anti-money-laundering fine as €21.4 million and puts it almost a year earlier. Decrypt, publishing at 18:36 on Thursday, gives €21.5 million and dates it to May. Decrypt's own URL reads 24.8m, which matches neither figure in its text. They do not reconcile. The November 2025 reporting of that case carried €21.5 million in euro terms and dollar renderings running from $24.6 million to $25 million, so part of the spread is currency and part of it is not. Thursday's figure is a fraction of either, and many times Europe's first published MiCA penalty of €70,000.

What the High Court does next

Before the settlement discount the penalty was €4,646,597, cut by 30% because the firm settled. It is the Central Bank's 164th enforcement outcome and the fifth under its undisputed facts process, in which a firm agrees the facts rather than contesting them. Cumulative fines imposed by the regulator now pass €432 million. The court will confirm the penalty unless it finds it manifestly disproportionate, and if it declines, the matter goes back to the regulator and the firm. No hearing date appears in anything read here. Neither the Central Bank nor Coinbase has said what the safeguarding account holds now.