MiCA, CASP licences & the EU crypto deadline

Beyond the legal definitions, the register itself tells a story. Our live analysis of all 367 entries (verified 14 October 2026):

• Custody dominates. 229 of 367 providers (62%) are authorised for custody and administration of crypto-assets, while only 22 may operate a trading platform, the rarest and most demanding of the 10 MiCA services.
• Most CASPs sit in capital class 2. MiCA ties minimum initial capital to the services held: €50,000 (class 1), €125,000 (class 2, adds custody or exchange) or €150,000 (class 3, trading platforms). By their authorised services, 94 providers fall into class 1, 251 into class 2 and 22 into class 3.
• The typical provider is specialised. A CASP holds 3.4 of the 10 services on average, and not a single firm holds all ten.
• Licensing has accelerated. The first three authorisations (all in the Netherlands) were granted on 30 December 2024, the first day MiCA applied to service providers; 281 of the current 367 entries were added within the last 12 months of register activity.
• Passporting is the norm. The median provider passports its licence into 10 EU/EEA markets; the widest passport covers all 30.

MiCA ties a provider's minimum initial capital to which of the 10 services it holds. Here is how the 367 authorised providers split across the three capital classes (verified 14 October 2026):

Re-running the CASP Tracker Verification Protocol on every ESMA update has surfaced quirks of the official data that generic articles miss.

The official register contains errors. Until ESMA corrected the rows in August and September 2026, two different French firms shared a single LEI in the source file and one German bank's row carried another company's brand name. We kept the two French firms as separate entries throughout, because we match on the LEI and the legal name together, never on the LEI alone.

One company can appear twice. When an authorisation is extended, ESMA sometimes re-lists the same legal entity as a new row (it happened to DekaBank and EUWAX). We merge those rows, which is why our total of 367 can be lower than a naive count of the raw CSV.

Absence from the EU warning list proves nothing. ESMA's non-compliance list (173 entities) is fed by only 5 national regulators (CONSOB, FSMA, AFM, Czech National Bank and NBS), so a firm can be unlicensed and still absent from it.

The register itself is temporary. ESMA publishes today's registers as interim CSV files and plans to move them into its own IT systems in the course of 2026; any site that does not re-verify the source regularly will silently go stale.