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

What Happened

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

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

Market Context

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Why It Matters

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.

Details

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.

Most Old VASP Registrations Did Not Become MiCA Licenses

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.”

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.