On July 1, 2026, the temporary permission that allows crypto companies to continue operating in Europe while they wait for a proper MiCA license will expire, creating a huge problem that falls squarely on regular users.
The European crypto law, known as MiCA, requires any exchange, broker or wallet service that wants EU customers to have an official license. Hogan Lovells counted only 194 licensed crypto companies in the EU in May 2026, including banks, in a market that had more than 3,000 registered crypto companies in 2024.
It is expected that approximately 75% of these older businesses will lose their right to operate once the grace period expires. Lawmakers emphasize that the law was written to protect consumers. But in the short term, it only protects them by cutting off access to any platform that isn’t licensed in time.
There are less than three weeks before the consent expires, which can make the deadline feel much less urgent than it actually is. Obtaining a license takes months of review by a national regulator, so any business that doesn’t already have one is essentially running out of time to get approved before the cut-off date.
For those companies, the coming weeks will be about closing down in an orderly manner, transferring their customers to a recognized competitor, or withdrawing from Europe altogether. ESMA, the EU’s market watchdog, has said these plans should have been ready well before July 1.
What the cutoff means for people who own crypto in Europe
What happens to users depends on which platform they use. If an exchange already has a MiCA license or operates through a licensed European division, the accounts should continue to operate much as they do now.
If a platform moves its customers to a licensed sister company, users may receive emails asking them to agree to new terms and re-verify their identity, as the EU expects licensed companies to transfer existing customers with full identity and AML checks in place before the deadline.
Unlicensed platforms will start blocking new deposits if they haven’t already done so, prompting users to withdraw their funds to wallets or other licensed exchanges.
Both exchanges and users will feel the most pressure in France, where regulators are taking the cutoff data quite seriously. The country’s financial regulator, the AMF, told unlicensed companies to stop trading from July 1 and warned that ignoring the rule is a criminal offense under French law, carrying a prison sentence of up to two years and a €30,000 fine.
The AMF can and likely will put unlicensed providers on a public blacklist, warn the public about them and ask the courts to block their websites. At a press event in Paris on May 28, AMF President Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani told reporters that it had become urgent for companies to submit their applications, and Reuters reported her warning that companies still serving EU customers without a license could be taken to court.
Unlike exchanges, most users will not experience any problems. They can check whether the platform they are using has its own MiCA license or operates through a licensed European company by checking their national regulator’s register or the EU’s central list of licensed companies.
A working app and a polished website only tell you that a company is still active, while the official register tells you whether it can actually serve you after the deadline.
MiCA will reshape the European crypto market
Complying with MiCA rules is expensive, and the costs fall on the banks, major exchanges and well-funded platforms that can afford the lawyers, capital and compliance staff the law requires. This essentially monopolizes the market, reducing it to a handful of licensed players.
Poland alone had more than 1,400 of these older registered companies, and the small, lightly regulated operators spread across Europe are likely to be the first to disappear as their old registrations expire.
The European crypto market that will emerge on July 1, on the other hand, will be smaller and consist almost exclusively of and around licensed institutions. Although that is exactly what the intention was to raise the bar, it is also the reason that a large part of consumer choice is disappearing.
That was the source of most of the political tension we’ve seen around MiCA over the past year. It sold a single, coherent European market, where one license gives a company the right to operate in all 27 EU countries, a fairly common regulation called passporting.
However, these licenses are actually issued by 27 separate national regulators, and they do not operate at the same speed or standard.
Malta in particular faced criticism from ESMA after questions about how such a small regulator could approve so many permits so quickly, and Barbat-Layani said France would be prepared to reject permits granted by countries it does not trust, calling it a “serious collective failure” that it would prefer to avoid.
So the July 1 deadline will act as a test of whether MiCA has truly created one unified market, or a race in which companies just look for the most lenient country and use its license to reach all the others.
Stablecoins have already shown us how this plays out once the rules bite. Despite being the largest stablecoin in the world, Tether’s USDT never met MiCA’s requirements, leading to Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com and Binance pulling it from their European platforms, while compatible tokens such as Circle’s USDC and its Euro version, EURC, retained their place in the market.
Tether’s response has been to invest in compliant European issuers while leaving USDT as is, and the approved list that has built up through 2025 has left some of the biggest names in crypto on the outside. The pressure that has reshaped the European stablecoin market in the Eurozone is now reaching the exchanges and brokers themselves.
The weeks around July 1 will be worth watching for the signs of all this in practice: major exchanges announcing moves to new European arms, regulators publishing warnings or blacklists, platforms shutting down services in France, Spain, Italy or Germany, any last-minute approvals and the flurry of emails to users about withdrawals and account transfers, all a clue as to where the market is settling.
The deadline meant to protect European crypto users will spend its first days showing many of them whether their exchange should serve them at all, and that is the contradiction for which MiCA must now answer.