Who is actually getting MiCA-licensed in Europe

By Mikolaj Slezak · Published 2026-09-20

Since our previous snapshot on 18 July 2026, the licence index we rebuild from the official registers grew by 75 entities, to 2,654. Almost all of that growth is MiCA: crypto-asset service providers went from 293 to 349 across the EEA, while payment institutions added 14 and e-money institutions 5. So the interesting question is not whether MiCA authorisations are landing - it is who is collecting them. In Germany, which now leads the table, the answer turned out to be local cooperative banks rather than crypto firms. That one fact changes how a register count should be read (ESMA data as of 2026-09-18).

The summer wave was almost entirely MiCA

Comparing the two snapshots entity by entity: 82 names appeared, 8 disappeared. Of the newcomers, 56 are CASPs, 19 payment institutions, 6 e-money institutions and 1 account information provider. Fifty-five of the 349 CASPs on the register today carry an authorisation date after 1 July 2026 - the last possible end of the MiCA transitional window - so what we are watching is the post-deadline queue clearing, not firms rushing to beat it. You can browse the same rows we counted on the licence index, filtered to MiCA CASP.

Germany leads - and 41 of its 91 CASPs are local cooperative banks

Germany holds 91 CASP authorisations, 26% of every CASP in the EEA, ahead of France (35), the Netherlands (29), Cyprus (25) and Malta (22). Read the names, though, and the lead splits in two. 41 of the 91 are cooperative or savings banks - Volksbanken, Raiffeisenbanken and VR-Banken such as Volksbank Euskirchen, Raiffeisenbank Aidlingen, Volksbank Sauerland or VR Bank Schleswig-Holstein Mitte. In July there were 11 of them; 30 registered in the last two months, and they account for 31 of the 55 post-deadline authorisations.

No other member state has a single one. Strip the cooperative sector out and Germany has 50 CASPs - still first, but next to France's 35 rather than double it.

What those banks are licensed to do - and what they are not

The register answers this precisely, because CASP authorisations name the services. 40 of the 41 cooperative banks hold exactly one service: execution of orders on behalf of clients. None holds custody except one, and all 41 passport to exactly one country - their own. This is a retail distribution footprint: a customer of a local bank can buy and sell crypto inside the app they already use.

The infrastructure sits one level up. DZ BANK AG, the central institution of the German cooperative sector, holds a CASP authorisation covering custody, execution and transfer services - the permissions the 41 local banks do not have. The pattern in the data is a sector wiring itself: distribution at the edge, custody in the middle.

Germany's crypto-native CASPs are a separate, serious list, and they are the ones a buyer of infrastructure would actually shortlist: Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, Tradias, Tangany, BitGo Europe, Crypto Finance (Deutschland), Bullish Europe, alongside banks and brokers such as Commerzbank, Baader Bank, Trade Republic, flatexDEGIRO and N26.

A MiCA licence is a European rulebook, not a European owner

The same register that shows European incumbents taking crypto rails in-house also shows the large US and offshore platforms sitting comfortably inside MiCA: Coinbase (Luxembourg), Kraken (Ireland), Crypto.com, OKX, Blockchain.com and Gemini (Malta), Bybit (Austria), Robinhood (Lithuania), Ripple (Luxembourg). MiCA authorisation says a firm meets a European rulebook and answers to a European supervisor. It says nothing about where the group is owned, where the data sits, or whose law reaches the parent - which is why this catalogue keeps origin, ownership and data residency as separate fields, and why the euro-stablecoin question is its own analysis.

What this means if you are buying crypto infrastructure

A register count is a count of licences, not a market of suppliers. Of the 349 CASPs in the EEA, only 30 correspond to a provider in this catalogue - a company that sells custody, on/off-ramp, tokenisation or stablecoin rails to other businesses and that we have verified at source. The rest are banks, brokers, asset managers and consumer apps that hold the licence for their own product. Three practical consequences:

• Filter by service, not by country total. "91 CASPs in Germany" and "the CASPs that could run your custody" are different sets. The services column - custody, exchange, transfer, execution - is the filter that matters.
• Check the passport before you plan a rollout. 132 of the 349 CASPs are authorised in their home state only; 87 passport to 30 states. Home-only is the norm, not the exception, exactly as it is for payment and e-money licences.
• Treat the register as the start of diligence. ESMA is explicit that its interim register has no legal significance; the home regulator's own register is the authority. Our MiCA licence guide explains what CASP, EMT and ART actually cover, and the verified crypto infrastructure category is where the provider-level work lives.

What the register does not tell you

Two things we ran into while reconciling the snapshots, worth knowing for anyone else working with these files:

• A row that disappears is not an exit. Eight names dropped out, none of them cross-linked to a verified profile. One of them, Amazon's UK payment-institution entry, still holds its UK e-money authorisation - the firm consolidated permissions, it did not leave.
• Identifiers move. The Bank of Lithuania renumbered national reference codes from company numbers to licence codes, so seven Lithuanian firms appeared simultaneously as new and removed. We reconcile snapshots rather than regenerate the file, which is why those cross-links survived - a blind re-pull would have silently lost them.

Every number above is reproducible from the licence index, which is rebuilt from the EBA, ESMA and FCA registers and carries its own as-of dates. Our method is described in how we verify.