MiCA tally reaches 283 CASPs: 6% hold trading-venue authority, 57% sit in 5 states

ESMA’s register of authorized crypto-asset service providers stands at 283 entries as the MiCA transition window closes. Of those, only 17 carry a license that specifically covers operating a trading venue — the rest are cleared for custody, crypto-to-fiat exchange, or transfer services.

The 283 figure hides a much smaller tradable-venue count

For desks pricing counterparty risk on EU-regulated venues, the headline register count is the wrong number to track. Trading-venue authorization sits at 17 firms out of 283, meaning roughly 6% of the total license base can legally run an exchange under MiCA. The remaining 94% cover adjacent permission categories — custody, fiat on/off-ramps, transfer services — that don’t equate to venue operation.

Approvals clustered into the final week

66 of the 283 total authorizations were dated in June alone, and 36 of those carry dates between June 23 and July 1 — the closing stretch of the transition period. Thirteen approvals landed on June 30 by itself, with one more processed on July 1, the last day firms could clear the gate under transitional terms.

That bunching lines up with ESMA’s prior guidance that unauthorized providers serving EU clients would have to stop onboarding and start winding down once the transition period expired. The clustering pattern reads as a compressed approval cycle rather than a steady drip of licensing — regulators appear to have cleared a backlog against a hard deadline rather than processing applications on a consistent cadence.

Licensing concentration cuts against MiCA’s passporting design

Germany holds the largest single-country share at 59 authorizations, ahead of France at 31, the Netherlands at 28, Malta at 22, and Cyprus at 21. Combined, those five jurisdictions account for roughly 57% of all 283 authorizations on the register.

That concentration is notable against MiCA’s core mechanism: a CASP licensed in any single member state is supposed to passport across the full EEA without a second national application. With the passporting rail already live, a license base still weighted toward five countries signals that the regulatory center of gravity hasn’t spread evenly across the bloc despite the framework’s cross-border design.

Read more: Standard Chartered Wins MiCA License as EU Crypto Register Hits 280 Firms

Sources

• ambcrypto.com