MiCA in Europe

The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, applies directly in every EU member state. Its supervision runs on three levels. National competent authorities, such as BaFin in Germany, the FMA in Austria or the MFSA in Malta, authorize crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) and issuers and supervise them day to day. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in Paris writes guidelines and technical standards, keeps the EU register and reviews how national authorities work. The European Banking Authority covers asset-referenced tokens (ARTs) and e-money tokens (EMTs), the two stablecoin categories of MiCA.

The MiCA in Germany page covers the German layer, the KMAG and BaFin's licensing process. The MiCAR page reads the regulation text and its four categories of crypto-assets. What happens between the member states follows below.

A CASP authorized in one member state can offer its services in all others, because MiCA makes the license valid across the EU. The firm notifies its home authority which countries it wants to serve, and the home authority passes that on to the host countries. That is why exchanges pick one home regulator for the whole EU: Bybit EU runs its European exchange from Vienna under a MiCA license from Austria, and OKX Europe runs its EU business from Malta under a MiCA license.

The passport also explains why supervisors watch each other's licensing. If one national authority authorizes faster or on thinner files than others, firms can use it as their door into the whole EU market. Whether a firm is licensed in Europe therefore has one answer per firm, not per country.

MiCA let firms that already served clients under national law before its start keep doing so for a transition period of up to 18 months, with each member state free to set a shorter one. According to ESMA's list of grandfathering periods, member states chose anywhere from 6 to 18 months. Germany chose 12, others went shorter or used the full period. For a firm serving several countries, that meant several deadlines.

Once the transition in a country ends, a firm without a MiCA authorization or a passport into that country must stop serving clients there. For the reader who asks whether the MiCA deadline is over in Europe, the answer is yes for most member states under that list, and the ESMA register is the place to check which firms hold a license.

ESMA publishes an interim MiCA register as five files: white papers for crypto-assets other than ARTs and EMTs, issuers of ARTs, issuers of EMTs, authorized CASPs, and non-compliant entities that provide crypto-asset services without authorization. It is updated weekly and is meant to move into ESMA's IT systems. Before trusting a firm's claim to hold a MiCA license, compliance teams look it up there.

ESMA also checks the national authorities. In its first MiCA peer review, ESMA looked at how the Malta Financial Services Authority authorized a CASP and found that the authority had granted the license while material issues were still unresolved or pending remediation. The review found that Malta met or largely met expectations on supervisory setup and resources, and the MFSA welcomed the report. For the industry the message was that ESMA will compare national licensing practice across the EU.

Stablecoins under MiCA are either e-money tokens, which reference one official currency, or asset-referenced tokens, which reference anything else. An EMT issuer must be a credit institution or an e-money institution. The EBA can classify an ART or EMT as significant when it crosses thresholds for holders, value or transactions, and the EBA then takes over part of the supervision, with stricter rules for the issuer. The stablecoins in Europe page covers the euro stablecoins issued under these rules.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for compliance officers at CASPs and banks, lawyers and the exchanges working under MiCA licenses. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.

Finance Loop partners with OKX, and at the Bybit EU Crypto Evening at TechQuartier a senior policy director spoke on compliance under MiCAR. The Crypto Assets Conference in Frankfurt covers regulation, custody and market infrastructure, and the MiCAR executive program of EBS Executive School and HEUKING teaches the rules in German. Finance Loop was media partner of the European Blockchain Convention 2026 in Barcelona, where CASP licensing and stablecoin issuance under MiCA were the focus, and official partner of Vienna Blockchain Week, whose program includes MiCA regulation. MiCAR and compliance were also topics of the Forum für Digitale Vermögenswerte, a German-language forum in Frankfurt with Finance Loop as partner.

Passporting means a CASP authorized in one member state can serve clients in the others without a second license. The firm tells its home authority which countries it will serve, and the home authority informs the host authorities.

For most member states, yes. Each country set its own transition period of up to 18 months for firms that operated under national law before MiCA; ESMA's list shows periods from 6 to 18 months. After the period ends, only firms with a MiCA license or a passport may serve clients there.

Look the firm up in ESMA's interim MiCA register, which lists authorized CASPs, ART and EMT issuers, crypto-asset white papers and non-compliant entities. The national authority that granted the license publishes it as well.

The European Commission proposed MiCA and adopts the delegated acts and technical standards that ESMA and the EBA draft. Supervision itself sits with the national authorities, ESMA and the EBA.