On 30 June 2026 the window the industry had been watching for eighteen months finally shut. National transitional regimes expired, and anyone providing crypto-asset services in the EU now needs a full MiCA licence.
We pulled the ESMA register and built a state-of-the-market report as of 27 July 2026. A few of the numbers tell a more interesting story than the headlines do.
Three numbers that describe the market
332 authorised CASPs across 28 European countries. The regulated crypto services market is formalising fast, and broadly.
21 EMT issuers. Compliant issuance of single-currency stablecoins is growing, but far slower and in noticeably fewer jurisdictions.
0 ART issuers. Not a single asset-referenced token has been authorised.
That last one is the most telling. MiCA Title III, which governs ARTs, is demanding enough that the market is simply routing around it. Issuers either take the simpler EMT path or defer the decision entirely. A rule nobody uses is also a result.
June 2026: a record that was entirely predictable
66 CASP authorisations in a single month. That is 20% of every licence granted in MiCA's history, compressed into the final weeks before national regimes expired.
This is not evidence of a demand explosion. It is evidence of how regulatory deadlines actually work: firms file when they must, and supervisors clear the queue when they have no choice. Worth remembering when you plan your own timeline, because NCA backlogs do not disappear overnight.
Where the market actually sits
Germany leads with 64 registrations, followed by France (36), the Netherlands (31), Cyprus (25), Malta and Spain (24 each). The top three countries account for 39% of all entities.
But the headquarters ranking is only half the story. The other half is passporting: 284 CASPs, 86% of the total, provide services cross-border. The single most common passporting destination is Germany, named by 215 entities.
In other words, the licence goes where the process is predictable, and the customer is served where the market is. Cyprus and Malta did not build 49 licences on local demand.
Jurisdictional specialisation is visible too. Germany and the Netherlands dominate CASP. France leads on EMT with 6 issuers, close to a third of the entire EU stablecoin issuer base.
What these firms actually do
The distribution across MiCA's 10 service codes shows where the market's centre of gravity is:
- Custody and administration of crypto-assets: 179 entities (54%)
- Transfer services: 168 (51%)
- Exchange of crypto-assets for funds: 148 (45%)
- Execution of orders: 137 (41%)
- Operation of a trading platform: 19 (6%)
The average CASP holds 2.9 service authorisations. The market is building custody and rails, not exchanges.
This is infrastructure, not speculation - and it is probably the most underrated finding in the whole dataset.
The CEE gap
Central and Eastern Europe is thin on the map. Czechia has 12 entities, Latvia 11, Lithuania 8, Estonia 3, Bulgaria 4, Slovakia 6, Slovenia 3. Poland shows a single EMT issuer and no presence in the country ranking at all.
Given the size of the Polish fintech sector, the engineering base and a decade of payment infrastructure experience, that is a hard result to defend.
We have seen this pattern before with PSD2. When the domestic licensing route is slower or less predictable than the alternatives, firms do not abandon the project. They file somewhere else and passport the service back home. The market stays, the supervision and the compliance jobs leave.
What to do with this
If you are planning a CASP licence, look at Germany and the Netherlands, both for process predictability and because they are the primary passporting destinations. If you are building an EMT, France is the most well-trodden path.
If you are considering an ART, be ready to go first. Zero authorisations a year into Title III does not mean it is impossible. It means nobody has yet concluded it is worth it.
And one thing that is easy to forget: an ESMA register entry is not product approval. It is transparency, nothing more. Responsibility for what you actually sell your customer stays with you.
The full report, including the complete country ranking, the authorisation timeline and the service-code breakdown, is available at micascan.eu. Data sourced from the ESMA register, as of 27 July 2026. We update it regularly.
If you are working on a MiCA application or weighing up jurisdictions, happy to talk. This report is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice.