In a significant development, leading crypto payments company BitPay has secured a license from the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets. The move is significant, as it allows the firm to operate across European Union member states under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.
The firm was previously operating under the supervision of the Dutch Central Bank, in line with anti-money laundering requirements. The announcement comes just weeks after the MiCA transitional period closed on July 1, a critical cutoff for companies offering crypto services that want to keep doing business across the bloc.
MiCA has been in effect since 2023, and it gave crypto firms a grace period to keep running on their existing national registrations while their full EU-wide authorization was still being reviewed. Firms had to either win approval or shut down by the deadline, and several countries moved even faster than the EU-wide cutoff. Germany and Ireland ended their local windows back in December 2025, while the Netherlands, Poland, Latvia, Hungary, and Slovenia gave firms only six months to get licensed.
Well over a thousand firms held some form of national crypto registration before MiCA came into play, yet only a small fraction, under one in five, had actually converted that into a full EU license by mid-2026. When the transition window finally shut, roughly 244 companies had made it onto the official EU authorization list, with a cluster of last-minute approvals coming out of Italy, France, Malta, and Spain.
On the development, BitPay’s European head, Jonathan Arler said, “Europe is one of the most important regions for the future of payments.”
Meanwhile, last month, Binance, the industry’s biggest exchange by volume, pulled its Greek MiCA license application and scaled back parts of its EU operations.
