Crypto License

The rapid expansion of the cryptocurrency market has transformed the global financial landscape, creating new opportunities for investors, businesses, and intermediaries. Among these intermediaries, cryptocurrency brokers play a crucial role by facilitating the buying, selling, and trading of digital assets for clients. However, as the industry matures, regulatory scrutiny has intensified, making ...

FINTRAC charges no fee to register or renew a money services business. The registration runs for two years and has to be renewed before it expires. Revenu Québec publishes the only MSB fee grid in the country, at $826 per service category for the year to 31 March 2027. Quebec’s cryptoasset ATM fee jumped from […]...

Custody appears on 194 of the roughly 330 CASP authorizations on ESMA’s register; operating a trading platform appears on twenty. The industry licensed itself as broker-dealers with wallets. Annex IV Class 1/2/3 are capital floors keyed to your highest-risk service, and Article 59 requires the authorization to name each service individually. Class 3 grants nothing […]...

The BPS Financial appeal turned on representative capacity, not on whether the principal’s AFSL reached the product, so a corporate authorized representative arrangement can be validly appointed, correctly registered and still leave the representative unlicensed. Scope is an intersection of entity, service, capacity, product class, client class, conditions and relief, and a mismatch on any [...

MAS’s Financial Institutions Directory lists 3,653 entities across 48 license types as of 7 September 2026, and Digital Token Service Provider is not one of them. Fourteen months after commencement, there is no public record of a single grant. The refusal power sits in section 138(3)(f)(iii), which lets MAS decline unless it is satisfied the […]...

Circle’s national bank cannot take a deposit or make a loan. The OCC granted final approval on 10 July 2026 for a trust charter limited to fiduciary custody and reserve management, and that is the shape every digital-asset applicant is being handed. Four regulators have now banned paying holders. MiCA Article 50, the GENIUS Act, […]...

The transitional deadline ran from a commencement reference of 5 March 2026, so the six-month Section 70 clock closed on 5 September and anyone serving Pakistani users without a filed application now faces up to five years, a fine of up to fifty million rupees, or both. PVARA notified the licensing framework on 21 August […]...

All ten MiCA register entries dated in August had Germany as their home state. No other country appeared. Nine of those ten were cooperative banks recorded for execution of client orders and nothing else. The tenth, dwpbank, carries custody, both forms of exchange and transfers. Dubai recorded six regulatory steps split evenly, three full VASP […]...

Xeltox Enterprises, trading as Cryptomus, was a registered money services business throughout the conduct that drew a $176,960,190 FINTRAC penalty in October 2025, roughly seven times the more than $25 million FINTRAC issued across all 23 Notices of Violation in 2024-25. The penalty is under appeal in Federal Court. The public registry runs four statuses, […]...

The registered PSP being acquired files the section 24 application, and it must be re-registered before the transaction closes, which puts the closing condition in the hands of the party the buyer is negotiating against. The Bank’s 45-day window is a period to decide whether to refuse a completed application, and the Minister of Finance […]...

The model law says a license “is not transferable or assignable,” which is why an equity purchase preserves the licensed entity and an asset purchase leaves the buyer applying from scratch, and the MTMA contains no merger or succession provision at all, so a deal in which the licensee stops existing has no statutory answer. […]...

Vanuatu has completely shifted its positioning. It is no longer a quiet, lightly supervised jurisdiction, but a formal, regulated hub operating under a strict Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) framework. The 2025 VASP Act structures crypto activities into five specific categories (covering exchanges, transfers, custody, token offerings, and bank-related services) requiring firms to prove real ...

There is no single best jurisdiction. The right one depends on your business model: exchange, custody, token issuance, payments, or DeFi. The EU’s MiCA is the closest thing to a real passport. One CASP license covers all 27 Member States. Nothing in the US or Asia gives you that. Capital requirements swing wildly. Under MiCA, […]...

MiCA’s single biggest advantage is the EU-wide passport. One CASP license, 27 markets. Singapore and Dubai never built one omnibus law. Singapore regulates crypto under its Payment Services Act, Dubai runs a multi-layer system across VARA, the DFSA, the FSRA, and the federal SCA. The stablecoin rules diverge the most. MiCA covers every stablecoin in […]...