Revolut, founded in 2015 and based in London, now holds a full banking license in the EU and U.K., and also caters to more than 80 million customers worldwide. The fintech was valued in July at about $115 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Zhou has been candid that a MiCA license alone is not enough to turn a profit in Europe, given the burden of compliance costs plus competition from other firms that can offer a more extensive range of products, such as derivatives. The EMI license will suffice for most of what Bybit wants to bring with its all-in-one place app, he said.
“For the EU, the fact is you need multiple licenses to compete and actually to turn a profitable business,” Zhou said. “The cost of getting a MiCA license is not so cheap. To be frank, we’ve been running the MiCA license for about a year now. It is not profitable.”
Meanwhile, there’s stiff competition across the bloc from financial apps such as Revolut, Zhou added.
“Unless you have all the bells and whistles and product lines, clients won’t shift just simply because you have something called crypto,” he said. “So there is the compliance burden, there’s the competitive environment. But what makes EU quite interesting is that you can present, in a very compliant way, the one super app.
