Europe’s official list of licensed crypto companies keeps growing, and it has quietly become the single most useful document for anyone holding, trading, or building on crypto in the EU. In its third update since the July 1 transitional deadline, the European Securities and Markets Authority added 15 more crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to its interim MiCA register, bringing the total to 309 licensed providers, as Cointelegraph reported from the update published late last week.
The names on the latest list tell you where the market is heading. Four of the fifteen are banks — led by BNY SA/NV, the Belgian subsidiary of US custody giant BNY Mellon, joined by three German cooperative banks: Spar-und Kreditbank Rheinstetten, VR-Bank Augsburg-Ostallgäu, and Raiffeisenbank Falkenstein-Wörth. The rest are digital-asset firms, including payments processor BitPay, Denmark’s Januar and SafeLynx Technologies, Coinify, and Latvia-registered Bleap and Nodu Digital. When regional cooperative banks in Bavaria are taking out crypto licenses alongside BitPay, the “banks versus crypto” framing is officially dead.
What the register actually is
The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation entered into force in June 2023 and created the EU’s first uniform rulebook for crypto-assets that fall outside existing financial services law. It covers authorisation, transparency, disclosure, and supervision for firms that issue or handle crypto — including the two regulated token categories, asset-referenced tokens (ARTs) and e-money tokens (EMTs).
The register is the public face of that regime. National regulators in each member state grant the licenses; ESMA aggregates them into one searchable interim register. A CASP entry means the firm can provide the specific crypto services it is authorised for — custody, exchange, execution, transfer — and can “passport” those services across all 27 member states from a single national license. The broader EU framework around the regime is laid out on the European Commission’s digital finance crypto-assets hub.
That single-license passport is the whole point. Before MiCA, a crypto firm needed a patchwork of national registrations — France’s PSAN, Germany’s BaFin licenses, Italy’s OAM list — each with different requirements. Now one authorisation opens the entire bloc.
Why July 1 mattered
MiCA’s rules for service providers have applied since the end of 2024, but existing firms got a transitional “grandfathering” window: companies already registered under national regimes could keep operating while their MiCA applications were processed. That runway ended on July 1. Since then, being absent from the register has stopped being a paperwork lag and started being a real problem — an unlicensed firm serving EU customers is now operating outside the perimeter.
That’s why the post-deadline updates are worth watching one by one. The second update brought in 14 CASPs, including Ripple Payments Europe. This third round adds the 15 above. Notably, ESMA reported no changes to the other MiCA registers in this round — authorised ART issuers, EMT issuers, and the list of non-compliant entities all stayed put. The action right now is almost entirely in service-provider licensing, not token issuance.
How to read the register like a pro
A few practical habits make the register genuinely useful rather than just reassuring:
Check the entity, not the brand. Licenses attach to specific legal entities — “BNY SA/NV” in Belgium, not “BNY Mellon” globally. A familiar logo on a website tells you nothing about which entity is actually serving you, so match the legal name in the app’s terms of service against the register entry.
Check the services column. A CASP authorised for custody is not automatically authorised for exchange or transfer services. The register lists the specific activities each firm may perform.
Watch the home member state. Germany and Denmark led the latest round with three new CASPs each, followed by Bulgaria and Latvia with two apiece, and one each from Belgium, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and the Netherlands. Where firms choose to be licensed shapes which national regulator supervises them day to day — and the spread across eight countries in one update shows licensing has moved well beyond the usual Paris–Frankfurt–Dublin corridor.
Treat absence as a signal. If a platform actively serving EU users isn’t on the register and isn’t a subsidiary of someone who is, ask why. Post-July 1, the legitimate explanations are running out.
The consolidation question
Not everyone reads 309 as an unqualified win. Compliance under MiCA is expensive — capital requirements, governance, reporting, audits — and it recurs every year. Gate Europe CEO Giovanni Cunti has warned that some licensed firms may struggle to sustain the required compliance resources over the long term, meaning the register could eventually shrink through attrition and consolidation even as new names join.
That cuts both ways for users. A licensed provider that can’t afford its compliance obligations is a different risk than an unlicensed one, but it’s still a risk — expect acquisitions, mergers, and quiet market exits among the smaller CASPs over the next couple of years. The register will record those departures just as publicly as the arrivals.
The bigger picture
Three updates into the post-deadline era, a pattern is set: every few weeks, a batch of newly authorised firms — increasingly including traditional banks — joins a public, machine-readable list that anyone can query for free. For EU crypto users, “is it on the register?” is becoming the first question to ask before moving funds anywhere. For builders, the register doubles as a market map: it shows exactly which competitors have regulatory clearance, for which services, in which countries.
The register updates land every few weeks; at the current pace, the 350 mark is a matter of months. The more interesting number to watch is how many of the next batch are banks.
