Customer deposits with crypto firm Coinbase Ireland grew by 63% last year

Coinbase Ireland is a subsidiary of the Coinbase Group. Another subsidiary, Coinbase Europe, was recently fined by the Central Bank of Ireland. 

Customer deposits held by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Ireland increased by close to 63% during 2024, as it grew its revenue over the course of the year to €58.3m, figures from its latest financial statement show.

According to the statement, the company generated €29.5m in revenue during 2023, which increased to €58.3m last year. However, profit for 2024 stood at just €3m — up from €1.6m year-on-year.

The company generates its revenue largely from e-money and payment service fees from Coinbase customers who reside in the European Economic Area. It also generates revenue from the provision of certain customer support and compliance services to Coinbase, Inc, which is an affiliate of the company.

The company’s cost of sales increased from €3m in 2023 to €21m in 2024. This, along with €35.6m in administration expenses, cut into the company’s profit for the year.

As of the end of December, the company had €134m cash in hand.

The value of customer deposits held by Coinbase Ireland grew from €458.9m in 2023 to €747m in 2024. The bank holds its customers' cash assets across four financial institutions: Citibank Europe; JP Morgan Chase Bank; AS LHV Group; and Banking Circle.

In early November, the Central Bank announced it fined Coinbase Europe, which also operates out of Ireland and is part of the overall Coinbase Group, more than €21m for failing to properly monitor more than €176bn worth of transactions on its platform for suspicious anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing activity.

According to the financial statement, Coinbase Ireland “maintains a non-exclusive agreement for e-money services with Coinbase Europe Limited and Coinbase Germany GmbH, both affiliate entities”.

All three entities are wholly owned subsidiaries of Coinbase Global.

Under regulations, Coinbase Europe is required to monitor customer transactions on an ongoing basis.

The company notified the Central Bank on November 21, 2023, relating to a non-monitoring issue on transactions between 2021 and 2022.

Following an investigation, the Central Bank fined Coinbase for “faults in the configuration of their transaction monitoring system”, which resulted in more than 30 million transactions “not being properly monitored over a 12-month period”.

“The value of these transactions amounted to over €176bn, and accounted for approximately 31% of all Coinbase Europe transactions conducted in the period when the faults existed,” the Central Bank said.

After an initial review Coinbase narrowed the total number of transactions missed down to 184,790 that needed further review. This subsequent monitoring led to the reporting of 2,708 suspicious transaction reports with a combined value of €13m.

Coinbase accepted it had breached its transactions monitoring obligations.