Your crypto platform may well have shut its doors this summer. None of it was your doing. As of 9 September 2026, the CASP register kept by the European Securities and Markets Authority listed 348 authorised providers across the European Economic Area, 135 of them coming from traditional finance: 135 ÷ 348, meaning almost four MiCA licences out of ten went to banks, brokers or payment institutions (¹). That ratio tells the MiCA story better than any legal definition. Bitcoin itself has not changed. Access to bitcoin has. You are about to learn why your favourite exchange is now called “something Europe B.V.”, why USDT vanished from certain pairs, and what exactly you receive in return.
Key takeaways
📋 Index
- MiCA replaces national regimes with one European licence.
- Since 1 July 2026, France’s PSAN status no longer exists.
- A licence granted in Dublin or Malta covers 27 countries.
- MiCA protects your segregated holdings, never their market value.
- Non-euro stablecoins face a daily usage cap.
One regulation, twenty-seven countries, a single licence
MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets. The text appeared in the Official Journal of the European Union on 9 June 2023, under the reference Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. It sweeps away the national regimes hastily assembled by a handful of member states, starting with France’s digital asset service provider status born of the PACTE law of 22 May 2019. Its ambition fits into six words: one file, twenty-seven markets opened.
What exactly does it lock down? Four blocks. Token issuance and public offerings, the provision of crypto-asset services, client protection, and the hunt for market abuse — insider dealing included, imported from securities law onto the blockchain. The wild west was not tamed by a single decree, but the sheriff now wears a European badge.
What the text deliberately leaves aside
MiCA does not swallow the whole ecosystem. Non-fungible tokens escape it, unless they tick certain criteria in the regulation or fall into an already regulated category. Crypto-assets qualifying as financial instruments answer instead to the MiFID directive. Decentralised finance with no identifiable intermediary? Largely out of scope. A blind spot openly acknowledged, which Brussels began reviewing before the transition period had even closed.
Why your bitcoin and your USDC follow different rules
The regulation splits the crypto universe into three families, and that taxonomy drives everything else: who may issue, under which licence, under whose watch. A stablecoin pegged to the euro and a video-game utility token do not inhabit the same legal world, even when they travel on the same chain.
| Family | What it covers | Who may issue it | Heaviest constraint |
|---|---|---|---|
| ART (asset-referenced tokens) | Value pegged to a basket: currencies, commodities, mixed assets | Credit institution or specifically authorised issuer | Ring-fenced asset reserve, redemption right, supervision by the European Banking Authority once the token turns significant |
| EMT (e-money tokens) | Value pegged to one single official currency: USDC, EURC | Credit institution or electronic money institution | Redemption at par at any time, ban on paying interest to holders |
| Other crypto-assets | Bitcoin, ether, utility tokens | Any offeror meeting the conditions of the regulation | White paper notified to the competent authority, civil liability for its content |
Notice the asymmetry. The first two families demand an issuer licence. The third asks only for a disclosure document. That is why nobody ever needed to authorise bitcoin: it has no issuer to authorise.
Timeline of a switch: from 9 June 2023 to 1 July 2026
Three years of runway. Publication on 9 June 2023, entry into force on 29 June 2023, then a two-stage application: the titles devoted to stablecoins bit from 30 June 2024, the rest of the regulation from 30 December 2024. Providers already registered with their national regulator then enjoyed an eighteen-month transition. It expired on 30 June 2026.
Since the following day, serving a European client without a CASP licence amounts to illegal practice. Unlicensed French providers had to organise their exit: transfer of holdings to an authorised firm or wind-down, with notice to clients. One country missed the train. Poland remains the only member state never to have passed the law designating its competent authority, so a Polish company cannot file an application at home — its regulator said so in writing in February 2026. The result: administrative exile towards Vilnius, Prague or Riga.
And the giants? Some stumbled. Binance withdrew its application filed in Greece in June 2026 for lack of authorisation, then told its European users it was ending its services in the Union.
How much does a CASP licence cost?
The regulation sorts the ten crypto-asset services into three risk tiers, and raises the own-funds requirement with each tier. Article 67 and Annex IV set a permanent floor, never a one-off figure to display on filing day.
| Class | Services covered | Permanent minimum capital |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Advice, reception and transmission of orders, execution, placing, transfers, portfolio management | €50,000 |
| 2 | Custody and administration, exchange for funds, exchange for other crypto-assets | €125,000 |
| 3 | Operation of a trading platform | €150,000 |
A provider must hold the higher of two amounts: that floor, or one quarter of its fixed overheads from the previous financial year (²). Put differently, the bigger the firm grows, the thicker its cushion must become. A platform with €4 million in fixed costs has to tie up one million, not €150,000.
⚠️ Observation
Germany tops the European licence ranking, and not thanks to its crypto platforms. In the register snapshot dated 9 September 2026, at least twenty-nine German entries are local cooperative banks — Volksbank, Raiffeisenbank, VR Bank — every one of them authorised for a single service: order execution (³). They run no order book and safeguard nothing. They add a “buy bitcoin” button inside the banking app used by their members. The country ranking therefore measures the density of the mutual banking network as much as national crypto momentum.
European passporting explains why your platform is Irish
A licence issued by any national authority applies across all twenty-seven, after a simple notification. That mechanism triggered a race for domicile: Coinbase and Kraken settled in Ireland, OKX in Malta, Bitpanda and Bybit in Austria. Day-to-day supervision then falls to the home-country regulator, while the European Securities and Markets Authority merely centralises the public register. Thirty-five French companies appeared in it on 9 September 2026.
💡 Tip
Look for the legal entity name, never the brand. The European register lists legal entities, not logos: “Coinbase” does not appear as such, but its Irish entity does. On the French list, an authorisation number beginning with A signals a MiCA licence granted by the AMF; a number beginning with E points to the old PSAN registration, which no longer counts as authorisation. Two minutes of checking, and you know who is legally answerable for your holdings.
What you gain, and what you do not
Start with the solid part. Crypto-assets entrusted to an authorised provider must sit apart from its own, legally and operationally, beyond the reach of its creditors should it become insolvent. Better still: the regulation holds the custodian liable to you for the loss of your tokens whenever the incident is attributable to it, capped at their market value at the time of the loss (⁴). It escapes that liability only where the event occurred independently of its operations. Every platform must also hold an orderly wind-down plan, drafted before the storm.
🚫 Pitfall
Confusing “regulated” with “guaranteed”. Most savers transpose their banking reflex mechanically: a European bank account carries a deposit guarantee of up to €100,000. No equivalent exists for crypto-assets under MiCA. The misunderstanding stems from vocabulary: licence, own funds, supervisory authority — the lexicon evokes banking, the safety net did not follow. If your authorised platform collapses, you recover your segregated tokens, not a public indemnity.
Second front: stablecoins. An issuer whose token is pegged to a currency outside the Union must stop issuing it once it exceeds, in payment usage, one million daily transactions and €200 million exchanged per day (⁵). Capping a private dollar-denominated means of payment: the goal fits in two words, monetary sovereignty. Since Tether never sought a European licence, USDT left the trading pairs of many platforms in the Union, while Circle’s USDC — authorised in France — took the prize.
Frequently asked questions about MiCA
Does it apply to my personal wallet?
No. The regulation targets providers holding crypto-assets on behalf of clients. A self-hosted wallet whose keys you alone control provides a service to nobody. You remain your own bank, with every risk that entails.
Does MiCA change my tax position?
Not by a single euro. The text belongs to prudential law and investor protection, not tax law. Your national reporting duties follow their own calendar.
Can a platform licensed abroad legally serve me?
Yes, provided its European licence has been passported into your country. Check the corresponding entry on its register file. A Swiss or Emirati authorisation, by contrast, counts for nothing here.
Sources and statistics
(1) Snapshot of the CASP register maintained by ESMA under Articles 109 and 110 of the regulation, taken on 9 September 2026: 348 authorised providers across the EEA, of which 213 crypto-native firms and 135 traditional finance entities. The calculation is one division: 135 ÷ 348 ≈ 38.8%, close to four licences out of ten. Nobody frames MiCA this way, even though the ratio captures the rebalancing under way.
(2) Article 67 and Annex IV of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114: own-funds floor of €50,000, €125,000 or €150,000 depending on the service class, or one quarter of the previous year’s fixed overheads where that figure exceeds the floor. The worked example simply applies the rule: 4,000,000 ÷ 4 = €1,000,000.
(3) Manual count performed on the German section of that same register snapshot: at least twenty-nine regional cooperative banks appear there, each authorised for the single service of order execution. The deduction about Germany’s top ranking comes from that line-by-line reading, not from any existing commentary.
(4) Article 75 of the regulation, devoted to custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients: mandatory written agreement, segregation of holdings, and provider liability capped at the market value of the crypto-asset lost in the incident.
(5) Usage thresholds set by the regulation for asset-referenced tokens and extended to e-money tokens denominated in a non-Union currency: one million transactions per day and €200 million in daily value, as a means of exchange. Crossing those limits forces the issuer to suspend issuance until usage falls back below the cap.
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