294 and Counting: ESMA's MiCA Register Hits the Brakes After the Gold Rush 🏦

The European Securities and Markets Authority added 14 crypto-asset service providers to its Markets in Crypto-Assets register on Thursday, lifting the total number of licensed CASPs to 294 in the second post-deadline update and signaling a markedly slower pace after the framework's initial licensing wave. The new cohort spans payments firms, traditional banks and private banking groups, including Ripple Payments Europe, the European payments arm of blockchain company Ripple; Portugal-based Bison Bank; and Croatia's state-owned Hrvatska poštanska banka, or HPB.

Traditional financial institutions featured prominently in the latest expansion. The update added two German cooperative banks, Volksbank Schwarzwald-Donau-Neckar and Raiffeisenbank Auerbach-Freihung, along with Liechtenstein-based Kaiser Partner Privatbank, underscoring continued bank participation in Europe's regulated crypto sector. The register already counts dozens of established finance institutions, including Spain's BBVA and CaixaBank, Germany's Commerzbank, France's CACEIS Bank and Standard Chartered Luxembourg. The latest additions followed ESMA's July 3 expansion of 37 CASPs, which constituted the first major post-deadline update after MiCA's transitional period ended.

ESMA reported no changes to its registers for electronic money tokens, a category of crypto-assets designed to maintain a stable value against a single official currency, or asset-referenced tokens, which are linked to multiple assets such as currencies or commodities. The EMT register counted 21 unique issuers, while the ART register continued to list no approved issuers. The regulator also added two entities to its non-compliant register following actions by Italy's Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa, naming Reversal Investment Group and Kortex and bringing the total on the non-compliant list to 164, a count that includes crypto exchange MEXC.