MiCA and Crypto Exchanges in the EU: Who Stayed, Who's on Thin Ice
Updated July 3, 2026
Photo: European Parliament hemicycle, Strasbourg, by Diliff / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
MiCA is the EU's single crypto rulebook, and its licensing window closed on 1 July 2026. Kraken, Coinbase, OKX, Crypto.com, Bybit, Gemini and KuCoin hold a CASP licence and keep serving EU customers. Binance, MEXC, HTX and Bitget reached the deadline without one. Tether's USDT was pulled from EU exchanges in early 2025, and Circle's USDC took its place as the compliant dollar coin.
Updated July 2026
If you kept USDT on Coinbase or Kraken from inside the EU, you have already lived through MiCA without reading a word of it. Sometime in the first months of 2025 the trading pairs thinned out, a support email told you to convert or withdraw, and Tether's dollar coin quietly left your account. No hack, no scandal. A new law did exactly what it said it would, and most people only noticed once their favourite stablecoin stopped working.
Two days ago, on 1 July 2026, the last piece of that law snapped into place. The grace period that let existing exchanges keep trading while regulators processed their paperwork expired. From now on, an exchange serving EU customers either holds a MiCA licence or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, it is operating on borrowed time. This is the map of who made it and who didn't.
What MiCA actually changed
MiCA, short for Markets in Crypto-Assets, replaced a mess. Before it, a crypto firm could hold a licence in Estonia, a registration in France and nothing at all in Germany, then serve customers in all three and argue about the details later. Twenty-seven countries, twenty-seven rulebooks, endless grey area. MiCA collapses that into one. A company registers once as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider, a CASP, in a single member state, and passports that permission across the whole union. Skip the process and you lose the legal right to serve EU customers at all.
The law arrived in stages rather than overnight. The stablecoin rules, the part that governs coins like USDT and USDC, took effect on 30 June 2024. The heavier rules for exchanges and custodians followed on 30 December 2024. Then most countries opened a grace window, up to eighteen months long, that let firms already operating keep going while their applications sat in the queue. That window is what closed on 1 July 2026. Regulators have not been shy about enforcement either: by late 2025 they had handed out more than €540 million in penalties.
Who stayed, and who's on thin ice
By late 2025 national regulators had signed off more than 40 CASP licences, most of them out of Malta, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria and the Netherlands. The consumer names you already use mostly cleared the bar. A cluster of others, many of them offshore or Asia-focused, reached the deadline without a public answer. Here is the split as it stands today.
Licensed & operating
No confirmed MiCA licence
Read this as a snapshot
Statuses move week to week. An application clears, a name jumps from the right column to the left, another stalls and slides back. Before you trust any platform with real money, look it up on ESMA's register rather than on a graphic. The table above is a starting point, not the final word.
The Binance question
The heaviest name in the right-hand column is Binance. It is the largest exchange on earth by volume, and it walked past the 1 July deadline without an EU authorisation. The story is odder than a flat rejection. Binance filed in Greece, and by its own account the Greek regulator found the application compliant. The file then moved up to ESMA for review and stopped moving. For anyone trading from an EU country, the effect is a patchwork: some products geofenced, some stablecoin pairs walled off, and a live risk that access narrows further while the paperwork waits. Binance keeps operating in exactly the grey zone MiCA was written to close.
The lesson is not that Binance will disappear tomorrow. It might sort out its licence next quarter. The lesson is that if the biggest exchange in the world can get stuck, keeping your entire balance on one unlicensed venue is a bet you don't need to make. Hold a licensed exchange in reserve so a sudden EU restriction can't trap your funds.
Why your USDT disappeared
MiCA saves its sharpest teeth for stablecoins, and this is where the biggest shock landed. To issue a stablecoin for EU users, a company needs an e-money licence and has to hold much of its reserve, up to 60% for the most heavily used coins, in European banks under strict conditions. Tether looked at that requirement and declined to apply. Its stated fear was that forcing tens of billions of dollars into EU bank deposits could put both the coin and those banks under strain at the same moment.
The knock-on effect hit within months. An EU-licensed exchange that keeps listing a non-authorised stablecoin puts its own licence at risk, so the exchanges chose the licence over Tether's coin. The delistings rolled out across early 2025:
| Exchange | USDT action for EU/EEA users | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Coinbase | Removed USDT for EEA users | 31 March 2025 |
| Crypto.com | Told EU users to convert or withdraw | 31 March 2025 |
| Kraken | Delisted USDT pairs for EEA traders | Early 2025 |
| Binance | Geofenced USDT pairs for EEA users | Rolled out 2025 |
Liquidity that used to sit on those order books drained toward decentralised exchanges and non-EU venues. Circle read the same rules and made the opposite bet. It won an e-money licence in France, which passports its dollar coin USDC and its euro coin EURC across all 27 member states. Inside the EU, USDC is now the default stable dollar. If your spending money lives in a stablecoin, that is the one least likely to vanish from your account on a Tuesday morning.
What to do about all this
- Look up your exchange on the ESMA register before you deposit. If the firm isn't listed, your money sits outside MiCA's safeguarding and complaint rules.
- Move stranded USDT. If you still hold Tether inside the EU, shift anything you can't afford to lose access to into USDC or a euro stablecoin.
- Keep a licensed backup. If you trade on Binance, MEXC or HTX from Europe, hold an account on a licensed exchange too, so one restriction doesn't lock you out.
- Check who issues your crypto card. The same CASP rules cover card providers, so a card from a MiCA-licensed issuer carries real protection that an offshore one does not.
That last point is the one most people miss. MiCA is not only about where you trade. It reaches the companies that let you spend crypto in a shop or online. A card from a licensed EU issuer sits under the same disclosure and safeguarding rules as a regulated exchange, with a real complaints process behind it. An offshore card gives you none of that. Before you load funds onto any card, find out who stands behind it.
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Frequently asked questions
MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, is the EU's single rulebook for crypto. It requires exchanges, custodians and card issuers to hold a CASP licence to serve EU customers, replacing the old country-by-country rules across all 27 member states. A licence in one country passports across the whole union.