- A notice circulating among Bitstamp customers says crypto deposits above €1,000 (roughly £870) from third-party wallets will be automatically rejected from 18 August.
- It applies to wallets in someone else’s name, not to your own wallet, and deposits from other exchanges are said to be unaffected.
- Bitstamp has not publicly confirmed the notice, and the user reports don’t say which legal entities, countries or account types it covers.
Say a client pays you in crypto, or a friend settles a debt, and you send it straight into your exchange account. That is the exact transaction a notice now circulating among Bitstamp customers says will stop working above €1,000 from tomorrow.
Money arriving from someone else’s wallet is completely normal if you get paid in crypto, sell something, or share a wallet with a partner. If a deposit like that gets bounced, the coins aren’t gone, but getting them back sits with the exchange rather than with you, and that can mean days of waiting and paperwork before you can touch your own money.
It also matters because nobody has confirmed the scope. Until Bitstamp says which of its entities this covers, UK customers can’t tell from the outside whether it applies to them.
What the notice actually says
According to a Bitstamp-branded notice reproduced by one customer, and an email reported by a commenter on the r/BitstampOfficial forum, crypto deposits over €1,000 coming from a third-party self-custody wallet will be automatically rejected from 18 August.
Two limits are worth reading carefully, because a lot of the alarm around this story ignores them. The notice targets wallets owned by someone other than the account holder. And it says deposits arriving from other exchanges are not affected. It does not describe a blanket block on customers moving coins in from their own wallets.
What it doesn’t say is anything about the exact launch time, the account types involved, or which of the group’s regulated entities are covered. Bitstamp, which completed its $200m merger into Robinhood in 2025, operates through several. Nobody reporting the notice has identified them.
What a “third-party self-custody wallet” means
Two bits of jargon, and both are simpler than they sound.
Self-custody means the coins sit in a wallet you control yourself, with the held by you rather than by a company. A private key is just a very long secret number that proves the coins are yours and lets you move them. Whoever holds it controls the money. If that’s new to you, our guide to self-custody starts from scratch.
Third party means the wallet isn’t in your name. Bitstamp’s own public API documentation has a field for this, marking a deposit as third-party or not depending on whether the sending address belongs to the customer. So the exchange has been classifying incoming transfers by origin for a while. What’s reportedly changing is what it does with the ones that aren’t yours.
Why exchanges are drawing this line at exactly €1,000
That figure isn’t plucked from the air. Under the EU’s rules on transfers of crypto, in force since the end of 2024, a crypto firm has to collect information about who sent a payment and who is receiving it, the same way banks do. For transfers involving a self-hosted wallet above €1,000, the firm is also expected to establish that the wallet really is owned or controlled by its customer.
Verifying that your own wallet is yours is doable. Verifying that a stranger’s wallet belongs to a stranger, and where their money came from, is much harder and much more expensive. Rejecting those deposits outright is the cheap answer, and several exchanges have moved in the same direction over the past year.
That’s the effect of it, whatever the intention. The compliance burden lands on the platform, and the platform passes the friction back to the customer.
What happens to a deposit that gets rejected
Rejected is not the same as lost, and it isn’t the same as frozen either. In practice an exchange either returns the funds to the address they came from or holds them while it asks for documents about where the money originated: an invoice, a contract, a screenshot of the sale.
The catch is timing. A transaction is final in minutes, but a returns process runs on the exchange’s queue. That can be a few days or considerably longer, and if the sender is someone you can’t easily contact again, it gets complicated fast.
What to check if you’re in the UK
Three things, none of which require you to trust any interpretation of the notice.
Check your email, including spam, for anything from Bitstamp about deposit rules, and check whether it names a specific entity. Check whose name the sending wallet is in before you send anything over about £870, because that is the only thing the rule reportedly turns on. And if you’re being paid in crypto by a client or a buyer, take it into a wallet you control first and move it on from there, which keeps the deposit a first-party transfer.
What to watch
Whether Bitstamp confirms the notice and publishes the scope. Until it names the entities and jurisdictions, nobody outside the company can say with confidence that UK accounts are covered, and that uncertainty is doing more damage than the rule itself would.
After that, whether other platforms follow. If a €1,000 ceiling on third-party deposits becomes the industry norm, getting paid directly into an exchange account stops being a practical option for a lot of people, and the workaround, holding your own wallet in the middle, becomes the default rather than the enthusiast’s choice.