40 Days After MiCA: What Europe’s Crypto Market Looks Like

BeInCrypto’s review of Europe’s licensing register finds a market led by custody firms and banks. Trading-venue permissions remain rare, Circle dominates compliant stablecoin supply, and enforcement is concentrated in one country.

Europe’s crypto transition period ended on 1 July 2026. Roughly forty days later, the licensed market is still taking shape.

The European Securities and Markets Authority register, updated on 12 August, contains 329 authorization rows. They represent 324 identifiable legal entities because several firms appear more than once when permissions are added, or records are duplicated.

That distinction changes how the market should be read. Europe has created a sizeable regulated perimeter. The practical market inside it is much narrower. Only 21 entities can operate a trading venue, while custody and transfer permissions dominate.

The later register also confirms the larger finding from BeInCrypto’s original research. Banks secured a meaningful share of the licenses. 

Circle supplies about 92% of the tracked MiCA-compliant stablecoin market. National regulators have applied the same EU rulebook in sharply different ways.

Data note: The graphics preserve BeInCrypto’s original 30 July snapshot, when the register contained 308 rows. The article text incorporates the ESMA update published on 12 August. ESMA publishes weekly and relies on submissions from national authorities. One German row carries a future authorization date of 28 August and was excluded from time-series comparisons.

The Register Lists 324 Firms, and Only 21 Can Run a Trading Venue

MiCA replaced national registration systems with a common authorization. A firm approved in one European Economic Area state can notify other markets and serve them without applying for a full license again.

The license covers ten separate crypto services. BeInCrypto normalized the latest ESMA service descriptions, which are not formatted consistently across national submissions.

Custody is the largest category, held by 218 of the 324 legal entities. Transfer services follow with 203. A total of 181 can exchange crypto for government-issued money, while 168 can execute orders for clients.

The permission to operate a trading platform sits near the bottom. Only 21 entities hold it, equal to 6.5% of the licensed market. The other 303 entities may provide services such as custody or brokerage, but they cannot run an order book that matches buyers and sellers.

This is why the headline license count can mislead. A crypto app may be authorized to exchange assets with customers from its own inventory while lacking permission to operate an exchange venue.

The market also splits between domestic specialists and firms seeking the full passport. In the latest file, 142 entities notified at least 27 target markets, about 44% of the register.

“Most of those authorizations are for narrower services: custody, brokerage, transfer, portfolio management and advice. In practice, EU spot liquidity is going to sit with a handful of names,” said Vyara Savova, senior policy lead at the European Ethereum Institute.

Most Old VASP Registrations Did Not Become MiCA Licenses

MiCA authorization is much heavier than the previous Virtual Asset Service Provider, or VASP, registrations. The old systems focused mainly on anti-money-laundering checks. MiCA adds scrutiny of capital, management, custody controls, and operational resilience.

BeInCrypto’s industry estimates place the initial legal and advisory work at €40,000 to €150,000. Compliance build-out can add €20,000 to €80,000. Technology work linked to the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act can cost a further €30,000 to €80,000. Recurring annual costs can reach €150,000 to €500,000.

James Harris, CEO of MiCA-authorised institutional asset manager Tesseract Group, said the fixed compliance burden falls hardest on smaller firms.

“A twenty-person firm has to build the same DORA, Travel Rule and AML stack as a three-thousand-person exchange. Authorisation as a CASP is something like ten to fifteen times harder than operating as a VASP,” said James Harris, CEO of MiCA-authorised institutional asset manager Tesseract Group.”

Europe’s wider VASP population once approached 2,700 registrations. Industry estimates place the active pre-MiCA market closer to 1,200. Those figures are different populations and cannot produce one precise conversion rate. Compared with 324 licensed entities today, they indicate that roughly three-quarters to almost nine-tenths of the previous market did not enter the new regime.

Authorizations arrived in deadline-driven waves. The original dataset recorded 81 in the fourth quarter of 2025 as Germany approached its earlier national cutoff. 

Another 102 arrived in the second quarter of 2026. The August register contains 34 entities with authorization dates on or after 1 July, although some were reported to ESMA later than their approval date.

The 1 July deadline therefore closed the legal transition without freezing the register. National authorities are still approving firms and sending older decisions to ESMA.

Binance Remains Outside The Register

Most large global platforms found a European base. Kraken authorized through Ireland. Coinbase and Bitstamp chose Luxembourg. OKX, Crypto.com, Gate, and Gemini appear through Malta. KuCoin and Bybit appear through Austria.

Binance remains absent from the 12 August CASP file. The company entered 1 July without a visible EU authorization and still has no matching register entry.

The names also illustrate the difference between a service license and a venue license. Kraken and Bitstamp hold the trading-platform permission. Several other well-known platforms appear with custody or exchange permissions and no authority to operate a MiCA trading venue.

Absence from the register does not by itself prove that a company is serving EU customers illegally. It shows that ESMA’s published records contain no matching MiCA authorization.

Three Countries Now Hold 41% of the Licensed Market

The passport created one legal perimeter, while licenses clustered in a small number of national hubs.

The 12 August register contains 70 German legal entities, 34 French entities, and 29 Dutch entities. Together they account for 133 of 324, or 41% of the market. Using raw register rows gives a similar result: 137 of 329.

Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Romania still have no authorized CASP in the ESMA file. Portugal left that group in July when its first entity appeared. Poland’s position reflects a stalled domestic implementation process, which has pushed local firms to seek authorization elsewhere and passport back into the market.

Token disclosures form a different map. ESMA now lists 960 white papers for crypto-assets other than stablecoins. Ireland accounts for 362, Malta for 159, and Germany for 146. A white paper is a disclosure filed by the offeror or issuer; ESMA states that national authorities have not reviewed or approved the documents.

Germany shows how the authorization threshold changed the mix of firms. In BeInCrypto’s 30 July classification, 29 of 63 German register entries were bank-named entities. The latest file contains 23 regional cooperative banks, up from 16 in that original snapshot.

Banks entered through custody and execution

Across Europe, BeInCrypto’s original classification identified 49 bank-named entities among 308 register rows. The group included Commerzbank, DekaBank, CACEIS, and Clearstream. CaixaBank and KBC were also present.

Their permissions point toward asset servicing. Banks entered through custody, transfers, and client-order execution. Very few operate a crypto trading venue.

Germany’s cooperative banks make the change easier to see. These are regional institutions serving local customers. Their entry suggests that crypto custody is moving into ordinary banking infrastructure.

Sabina Liu, managing director at KuCoin EU, said banking relationships are becoming a measure of operational maturity because regulated institutions require strong governance and controls from their partners.

“Strong banking partnerships are a reflection that you have met the standards expected by regulated financial institutions, including around governance and controls”, said Sabina Liu, managing director at KuCoin EU.

The shift also changes the competitive question. Crypto-native firms still supply most consumer-facing products. Banks now control more of the custody and settlement infrastructure that those products need to operate inside the regulated market.

Circle Supplies about 92% of MiCA-Compliant Stablecoins

The 1 July cutoff had little visible effect on global stablecoin supply. The main market adjustment happened earlier, when European venues removed or restricted non-compliant tokens during 2024 and early 2025.

BeInCrypto’s 30 July classification tracked $78.9 billion issued under MiCA-compliant arrangements and $193.1 billion without an EU authorization. Circle’s USDC and EURC supplied about $72.7 billion of the compliant total, close to 92%.

That concentration remains broadly intact. DefiLlama data retrieved on 14 August placed USDC near $72.0 billion and EURC at €463.6 million. USDG stood near $3.41 billion.

USDT remained much larger globally at about $183.0 billion, even though it lacks a matching MiCA issuer authorization.

The original 90-day sample found USDG growing 34% while several larger compliant coins contracted. Its smaller starting base explains part of that rate. 

USDG accounted for roughly 4% of the compliant pool, so the growth signaled diversification without threatening Circle’s lead.

The euro segment continues to grow. The four largest tracked euro coins, EURC, EURCV, EURI, and EURe, held about €694 million on 14 August, worth roughly $800 million at current prices. The original 30 July snapshot placed the rail near $773 million.

The latest ESMA file contains 43 e-money-token white papers from 23 named issuers and no authorized asset-referenced token issuer. An e-money token tracks one official currency. An asset-referenced token can track a basket of currencies or other assets and faces a higher regulatory threshold.

The issuer list is deeper than the live market. It includes bank-backed projects and specialist electronic-money firms, yet supply remains concentrated in a few established tokens. The register measures permission to issue; circulation data shows whether a token has found users.

MiCA-compliant tokens now dominate the tracked euro market. A residual €4.8 million of Tether’s EURT remains visible in DefiLlama data, so the on-chain supply has not fallen completely to zero.

A License Does Not Create a Liquid Market

Trading permission gives a venue legal access to the market. Liquidity still depends on users, market makers and connected order flow.

BeInCrypto’s 30 July snapshot found $386.6 million of spot order-book depth within 2% of the market price on Kraken. That was greater than Coinbase, Crypto.com and Bybit EU combined in the same dataset. Only four licensed venues showed measurable perpetual-futures depth.

Order-book depth at selected licensed venues. Source: BeInCrypto analysis using DeFiLlama data; 30 July snapshot.

The result matches the licence register. Europe has hundreds of authorized service providers and a small venue market. Liquidity is concentrated even within that smaller group.

MiCA Leaves DeFi and Custody Questions Unresolved

MiCA covers centralized service providers and excludes services delivered in a fully decentralized manner without an intermediary. The difficult cases sit between those positions.

An identifiable operator can bring a project into scope. Control of an interface, an upgrade key, or a fee switch may show that a company still manages the service. The legal outcome depends on the facts of each project.

The latest register contains 56 entities with portfolio-management permission, about 17% of the licensed market. That is the most direct route for firms offering regulated products that use decentralized finance.

Tesseract uses separate on-chain vaults for each client and manages them as discretionary portfolios. Harris said the compliance model is built into the product structure rather than added after deployment.

Custody creates a separate legal test. Article 75 of MiCA requires client crypto-assets to be legally and operationally segregated from the custodian’s own estate. The rule is designed to keep client assets away from the custodian’s creditors.

MiCA does not harmonize national insolvency law or require a separate blockchain address for every individual client. Omnibus wallets remain possible. A licensed custodian failure would therefore test how the EU segregation rule interacts with local insolvency procedure and record-keeping in practice.

No major insolvency of a MiCA-authorised custodian has produced that precedent since the transition ended.

Brussels is Reviewing the Law as Enforcement Remains Uneven

The European Commission opened a targeted MiCA review on 20 May. Its 86 questions cover stablecoins and CASP rules. The paper also asks about DeFi, staking, and other activities outside the current perimeter.

The response deadline is 30 September 2026. The review report is due to the European Parliament and Council by 30 June 2027.

Savova expects the stablecoin debate to remain tied to European monetary sovereignty. She also sees a risk that political pressure produces rules that push smaller firms offshore.

The current enforcement data shows why calibration matters. ESMA’s 12 August file lists 167 public alerts for non-compliant entities. Italian regulator CONSOB issued 165. The Dutch AFM and the National Bank of Slovakia issued one each.

ESMA told unauthorised providers in June to stop onboarding EU customers and begin an orderly wind-down after 1 July. The public-alert register shows little visible action outside Italy so far.

Harris said authorization becomes a durable commercial advantage only when supervisors act against unlicensed providers targeting European customers. Savova expects a licensed core to coexist with a smaller grey market until several visible cases set the standard.

The licensed firms are carrying the full cost of authorization. Their commercial advantage depends on national supervisors applying the perimeter to competitors serving European customers.

The First 40 Days Produced a Licensed Core

BeInCrypto made six calls before the transition ended. Three held: licenses clustered in national hubs, compliant stablecoins gained functional importance, and the ART register stayed empty. The expectation that every major exchange would secure a license failed because Binance remains absent.

The attrition forecast needed a wider range because the historical VASP count and the active-market estimate measure different populations. The timetable for a MiCA review also proved faster than expected.

The market now has a visible center. It consists mainly of custodians, brokers, and banks. Twenty-one entities can operate trading venues, and liquidity is concentrated among a smaller set. Circle remains the main compliant settlement issuer.

The next test is enforcement. Visible action beyond Italy would strengthen the licensed market. Continued inaction would leave authorized firms paying for a regulatory perimeter that offshore competitors can still reach.

MiCA has built the register and the passport. The next year will show how much market power they carry.

The post 40 Days After MiCA: What Europe’s Crypto Market Looks Like appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Source link