The Central Bank of Ireland has fined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase €21.5mn for failing to properly monitor transactions, some of which were potentially associated with child sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
The US crypto exchange failed to monitor more than 30mn transactions worth over €176bn, the central bank said on Thursday. These accounted for about 31 per cent of all transactions that went through its European entity over the period when the monitoring faults existed.
About €13mn of the non-monitored transactions were suspected to be related to money laundering, scams, child sexual exploitation and other criminal activity, the central bank said, adding that it “cannot say” whether any of these transactions resulted in a criminal offence.