The authorised cohort is real but thin against the field it replaces. Readings of ESMA’s interim register put full CASP authorisations at 204 as of 18 June 2026, against more than 1,200 virtual-asset registrations under the old national regimes, a conversion rate below a fifth. The names through the gate, Bitvavo via the Dutch AFM, Bitpanda via Austria’s FMA, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, and Crypto.com and OKX through Malta, with Revolut and eToro under CySEC, are the exception, not the norm; Malta alone accounts for 13 of them.
The geography of the gap
The attrition is not spread evenly. Ten member states had produced no public CASP authorisation records in the interim register as of May 2026, which leaves a cluster of jurisdictions where the gap between formerly registered firms and licensed ones is at its widest, and where the post-deadline cleanup will be heaviest. Estonia is the clearest illustration of the squeeze: a regime that reported hundreds of licensed virtual-asset providers earlier in the cycle had been cut to a fraction of that by early 2025 as the national bar rose ahead of MiCA.
For operators, the read is straightforward. Liquidity, custody and referral relationships anchored in the lagging states carry the most counterparty risk into July, because the chance that a given provider there is unlicensed on 2 July is materially higher than in the Netherlands, Germany or France.
The stablecoin map is already settled
On stablecoins the reset happened well ahead of the deadline. Circle’s USDC and EURC are the only top-ten tokens carrying full e-money-token authorisation. Tether did not apply for USDT, with reserve composition the cited sticking point, and EU venues moved early: Coinbase pulled USDT for EEA users in December 2024, Crypto.com in January 2025, and Binance delisted it and other non-compliant tokens from EEA spot in March 2025.
The consequence for venues is the part that still has teeth. An EU-licensed CASP that keeps a non-authorised stablecoin on the book for EU clients risks its own permission, which turns a listings decision into a licence-preservation one. The liquidity question follows from there: as the last non-compliant pairs come off EU venues, watch for thinning depth and wider spreads in euro and dollar stablecoin markets onshore.
What it signals
The headline number, a conversion rate under a fifth, says the EU has chosen a smaller, supervised market over a large, lightly registered one. That is the policy working as designed, not a failure of it. For the firms left inside the perimeter, the prize is the passport: one authorisation, 27 markets. For the field as a whole, the next two quarters will show whether the NCAs enforce the new boundary uniformly or at 27 different speeds, and whether the firms that exited the EU resurface through reverse-solicitation or third-country routes that ESMA has already said it will scrutinise.
What to watch
The first post-deadline enforcement actions, and whether they land in the lagging member states first. Any liquidity dislocation on EU venues as the last non-compliant stablecoin pairs are removed. And the next regulatory overlay: the AMLA technical standards due on 10 July, with the new authority selecting its first directly supervised entities, CASPs among them, ahead of supervision proper in 2027 and 2028.
MiCA: who got the licence, and the stablecoin shakeout
