MiCA register analysed: only 21 of 329 authorisations are trading platforms

Since 1 July 2026, any platform serving customers in the EU needs a granted MiCA authorisation. An application in progress no longer counts. Anyone who wants to know which firms actually cleared that bar does not have to take a press release on trust: the European Securities and Markets Authority publishes the register of authorised providers as an open file, no login required. We downloaded that file and worked through all of it. The register is dated 4 August 2026 and was pulled on 6 August. What comes out of it matches the industry's self-description only in part. The most striking finding sits further down and reads: of 329 authorisations, exactly 21 permit the operation of a trading platform. What the register actually says At the cut-off date the register holds 329 authorisations, spread across 322 legal entities with their own LEI code and 26 states of the European Economic Area. The gap between the two figures comes down to companies appearing more than once, typically where an authorisation was later extended. The raw data is available as a CSV. Anyone who wants to redo the arithmetic will find it here: CASPS.csv in the ESMA register. The folder in the path reads 2024-12, ...