Europe’s Crypto Firms Face Squeeze as MiCA Transition Period End Looms

Europe’s crypto industry is bracing for a shakeout.

The transition period for the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, ends July 1, closing the window in which firms could keep operating under older national regimes. From that point, companies serving EU users are expected to hold a MiCA license, a single authorization that passports across all 27 member states.

For its backers, the milestone is a turning point. Alexis Sirkia, captain of trading-infrastructure firm Yellow Network, said the end of the transition period pushes the industry into a “new phase of growth,” with clearer rules helping to establish transparency and trust. MiCA’s success, he argued, “won’t be measured by the number of licences issued, but by whether it helps drive broader adoption.”

The reality on the ground is messier. Around 200 firms now hold full CASP authorization, according to ESMA’s public register, a fraction of the pre-MiCA market.

Avital Haitovich, partner and head of blockchain at law firm Gornitzky, said the low figure is unsurprising. She pointed to an application process that can run to hundreds of pages on governance, AML controls, capital adequacy, and operational resilience, followed by multiple rounds of regulator questions. By mid-2026, she noted, not every member state had even issued its first licenses.

Haitovich said MiCA is both strengthening the European market and risking pushing liquidity elsewhere, “the core trade-off in any early regulatory framework.” A single passport and common rules make the bloc easier for institutions to navigate, but costly compliance is “likely to accelerate consolidation,” she said, leaving a market that could be “smaller, more concentrated, and more tightly supervised.”

The squeeze is already visible at the top. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is likely to be denied an EU license, Reuters reported, with Greece’s market regulator expected to reject its application before the deadline. The exchange said it believes it is compliant and remains “willing and ready to operate under a truly harmonized MiCA regime,” though it warned that disruption to its access could weaken liquidity and competition across the bloc.

For some, a consolidation is overdue. Joe Buttram, CEO of digital-asset infrastructure firm Field Digital, called the prospect “an inflection point in Europe’s crypto brokerage sector.” He argued that European brokerages remain fragmented, threatening their competitiveness against global rivals, and predicted an uptick in acquisitions in the near term.

The shake-out is also impacting VC investment. Varun Datta, CEO and founder of early-stage venture firm Truth Ventures, said the Binance episode underscores that “scale is not the same as durability.” Regulatory clarity has become “a filter that directs capital toward founders building for long-term adoption,” he argued, favoring firms that treat compliance and governance as a core product offering.

The future of MiCA

Even as the deadline forces centralized firms into line, regulators are turning to the question of decentralized finance. Malta’s financial regulator this week began exploring how DeFi might fit within MiCA, noting that many ostensibly “decentralized” projects still retain central features like administrator keys, governance control, and protocol upgrade rights.

In a discussion paper open for feedback until July 10, the Malta Financial Services Authority asked whether decentralization should be treated as a spectrum rather than a binary, and when a protocol should fall outside MiCA’s scope.

The end of MiCA’s transition period is just the first step in establishing Europe’s regulatory framework—and Malta’s exploration of how DeFi fits within it underscores “the growing importance of decentralized infrastructure and on-chain financial services,” Datta said. He added that if Europe gets the balance right, MiCA could become “a catalyst for attracting the next generation of blockchain startups and institutional capital to the region.”