How we research and check facts

Everything on cryptocurrency.irish is built the same way: start with the primary source, record when we looked, label anything weaker, and say plainly what we could not confirm. This page sets out the rules we follow, so you can judge the work and hold us to it. Our about page explains who we are, and the Central Bank of Ireland, Revenue and ESMA are the sources we reach for most.

The source hierarchy

We rank sources by how close they are to the fact.

First, primary and official sources. For regulation: the Central Bank of Ireland, the Irish Statute Book, EU texts and ESMA. For tax: Revenue (revenue.ie), including its Tax and Duty Manual. Also gov.ie, the ECB, the Garda website and the Oireachtas where relevant. For a provider's fees, limits and terms: the provider's own published pages, legal documents and help centre.

Second, regulated or professional analysis. Law-firm briefings, regulators' speeches and financial press can help us find where to look, but we do not use them as the final word on something a primary source could settle.

Third, aggregators, directories and community sources. Map sites, comparison sites, forums, social posts, review sites and promotional blogs. We treat these as leads, never as proof. If we use one, we say so on the page.

We do not copy figures from other comparison sites. We have seen the same unsourced number, for instance a count of Bitcoin ATMs in the country, repeated across several blogs with no data behind it, and we do not treat repetition as verification.

The three labels

When a number or claim matters, it carries one of three labels in our working notes, and the page text reflects it.

The registers we check

For anything about whether a firm is authorised, we use the ESMA interim MiCA register, which ESMA publishes as downloadable files, including authorised crypto-asset service providers, non-compliant entities and the stablecoin and white-paper lists. We search by the exact legal entity, note the home Member State and the services listed, and record the file's last-modified date. The Central Bank of Ireland's consumer pages tell consumers to use the same register, and our page on crypto firms authorised in Ireland shows the result.

We keep two groups separate: firms whose home state is Ireland, and firms authorised elsewhere in the EU that list Ireland as a service country. Appearing on the register does not prove a firm is accepting Irish customers, so we check the provider's own terms too.

How we record fees and limits

Fees and limits move, and some pages are served differently depending on where the visitor is. So we record them as follows:

• We write "listed at" with the figure, the date and the source page.
• We note if the figure came from an archived copy or a page served for another country, and we keep that caveat in the text.
• We use euro figures and convert nothing silently. If a provider quotes dollars, we say so.
• We tell you to confirm on the provider's site before acting, because we cannot see your account-level pricing.

Where we could not read a fee from an operator's site at all, we leave the number out and explain why instead of filling the gap with an estimate. Our fees page applies these rules.

The "Facts last checked" line

Each substantive page carries a date. It means that on that date we re-read the primary sources named in the page. It does not mean we monitor them daily. Taxes and regulation have specific triggers that we watch for: the Budget (Budget 2027 is on 6 October 2026, and rates should be re-checked after it), Revenue's manual updates, ESMA's register updates, which are weekly, and CBI statements. We review pages when one of those changes, and when a reader tells us about an error. Pages that rely on a volatile fact, such as a provider's fees, are the first we recheck.

How we order lists

Where we present an ordered list of providers, the order is editorial. It reflects our judgement of the verified facts in front of us: regulatory standing, clarity of published terms and fees, and relevance to Irish residents. It is not a ranking of investment performance, trading volume or returns, and it is not a recommendation to use any provider. You should know that, as our about page says, the site may include outbound links to providers, and you should weigh the order with that in mind. The criteria above are the ones our editors apply, and we state the facts, including regulatory gaps and risks, whatever the order. If the facts change, so does the order.

Limitations we have hit

We would rather admit gaps than hide them. Examples from the latest research round, on 5 October 2026:

• Coin ATM Radar could not be opened by our tools: it blocked automated access, and we did not try to bypass it. So every claim about Bitcoin ATM counts rests on second-hand snippets and blog posts, and we publish no machine addresses as fact. See Bitcoin ATMs in Ireland.
• The Central Bank's registers site loads its content with JavaScript and could not be queried by our tools, so we rely on the ESMA files for authorisation checks.
• Some government and bank pages (for example gov.ie and several bank sites) returned errors to automated requests, so we do not state bank policies that we could not read.
• EU legal texts on EUR-Lex were blocked for automated reading, so some article-level detail on the Anti-Money-Laundering Regulation is second-hand and flagged as such.
• Some tax questions are not addressed by Revenue's manual. For example, the manual does not set out the income tax treatment of staking rewards or airdrops, and it does not say whether the four-week matching rule for shares applies to crypto. We say so rather than quoting software vendors as if they were Revenue.

Corrections policy

If we find or are told about an error, we check it against the primary source, fix the page, and update the date. If the error could have affected a financial decision, for example a wrong rate or deadline, we add a short correction note on the page saying what changed. We do not quietly edit and hide it. To report a problem, email contact@cryptocurrency.irish or use the contact page.

What we will not publish

We do not publish invented statistics, made-up quotes, fee guesses, unverified addresses or promises of returns. We do not write price predictions or coin-picking lists. We do not accept requests to remove accurate information about regulatory status or risk. And we do not give personal advice. See our disclaimer.