Europe's MiCA register passes 294 firms, but the licensing pace tells the real story
The bloc's crypto licensing list has reached 294 names, yet the pace of new authorisations has visibly cooled as banks and payments heavyweights crowd in ahead of smaller firms.
On 17 July 2026 at 10:40 UTC, the European Securities and Markets Authority added 14 new crypto-asset service providers to its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation register, including Ripple Payments Europe, lifting the bloc's total count of licensed providers to 294. The announcement, carried simultaneously by Cointelegraph's news and markets desks, was cast as a routine expansion. Read in isolation, that framing is generous. Read against the trend, it captures a more uncomfortable truth: Europe's flagship crypto regime is still signing firms, but it has stopped signing them quickly.
MiCA, in force across the European Union since 2024, was sold as the world's first comprehensive horizontal crypto framework: one rulebook, one supervisor network, one passport for firms authorised in any member state to serve clients across the bloc. The register is the visible artefact of that promise. Its growth curve, however, has flattened in recent quarters as national competent authorities work through backlogs, and as the easier applicants have already cleared the gate. What arrives now is a different cohort: established payments networks, regulated banks, and a long tail of mid-tier exchanges still waiting.
A register that bulges at the top
The 14 names published this week are not a uniform group. Cointelegraph's coverage identifies Ripple Payments Europe among them, signalling that the payments-infrastructure side of the crypto industry has decided it needs European cover under MiCA, not merely exposure to European counterparties. Banks, both directly and through custody subsidiaries, have been a growing share of recent approvals as they convert existing e-money and payment-services licences into full CASPs.
For an industry that spent two years arguing MiCA would suffocate innovation, the shape of the register is instructive. The first 100 entries were dominated by crypto-native exchanges and custodians. The latest tranche looks more like a payments-directory upgrade. What that implies for the firms still waiting, particularly smaller exchanges that built their business models around non-EU bases, is not yet visible in the data, but the direction of travel is plain enough.
The counter-narrative: regulation as moat
Critics of MiCA, including parts of the US digital-asset lobby, frame the regulation as a barrier that locks out dollar-denominated liquidity and fragments global markets. That argument has force in the abstract. It has less force on the register itself. ESMA's list now includes names whose parent companies previously operated outside the EU and have chosen to relocate, restructure, or localise entities to gain a MiCA passport. London-headquartered and Singapore-headquartered firms appear in the same register as Paris-, Frankfurt-, and Vilnius-licensed ones. The passport is being used, not avoided.
The harder question is whether the licence actually translates into activity. Several providers on the register have publicly disclosed client bases and euro-denominated volumes well below the scale their licence technically permits. Regulators have so far declined to publish utilisation data, leaving the gap between authorisation and use as the next pressure point in the framework.
What the slowdown looks like
Cointelegraph's headline characterisation, that licensing is slowing, is supported by the arithmetic. Earlier rounds under MiCA routinely added 20 to 30 CASPs per month. The current pace is closer to half that. Two factors explain most of the gap. First, the backlog of straightforward applications has cleared. Second, the supervisory expectations ESMA published in late 2024 and early 2025, covering governance, conflict-of-interest arrangements, and the prudential treatment of algorithmic stablecoins, have hardened the bar. Applicants that once expected a near-automatic conversion from existing e-money or payment-services licences now face additional documentation rounds.
This publication finds that the slowdown is not evidence of MiCA's failure. It is closer to evidence of MiCA becoming what it was always going to be: a permissioned regime with a real cost of entry.
Stakes and what to watch next
The next two quarters will show whether the deceleration is structural or cyclical. Three signals matter. The first is the share of payments and banking firms in future batches, a measure of how far MiCA has been captured by incumbent finance. The second is the treatment of euro-denominated stablecoins, where the European Central Bank has signalled tighter reserve and issuance rules than the United States has so far imposed. The third is the unresolved question of equivalence with non-EU regimes, particularly the United Kingdom and Switzerland, which would determine whether MiCA's passport becomes the global default or a regional silo.
For now, the register is bigger, and the pipeline is thinner. Both facts can be true at once. The MiCA experiment is not over. It is just entering the phase where the politics of who got in begins to matter as much as the number of firms that did.
How Monexus framed this: the wire reported the headline number, 14 firms, and the headline characterisation, slowing licensing. This piece treats the count as a starting point, not the story, and asks what the composition of the register says about who MiCA was actually built for.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/cointelegraph
- https://www.esma.europa.eu
- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32023R1114