Crypto exchange
You quote a price and trade against the client. 189 rows hold it, and crypto-to-crypto almost never stands alone.
What your business model is, in the regulation's words
MiCA has never heard of an exchange, a wallet or a brokerage. It authorises ten named services, and the translation from what you are building to which of those you are providing is where most applications go wrong before a word is drafted.
Trading platform
You match third parties. The rarest permission in Europe: 22 rows, none of them Lithuanian.
Custody and wallets
You hold client assets or the keys to them. The most-held permission at 233 rows, and the one that pulls almost everyone into class 2.
Broker and order routing
You execute or pass on client orders. 219 rows name execution, and the figure is badly misleading.
Payments and transfers
You move crypto-assets on a client instruction. 217 rows, and the model that collides hardest with e-money licensing.
Why the translation matters more than the label
Nobody is refused for calling themselves the wrong thing. What happens instead is quieter and more expensive. A firm scopes itself as a broker, budgets for the class 1 floor, then discovers at the governance stage that it holds client balances, which is custody, which is class 2, which changes the capital, the policies and the people. Or it describes itself as an exchange, is quoted for class 3 by an adviser who heard the word platform, and pays for operating rules and a market-abuse detection system it never needed.
The five pages here start from the product and work back to the service letters, rather than the other way round. Each one also shows what the European register says about that permission: how many firms actually hold it, where they are, and what they hold alongside it. Those counts are the part nobody publishes, and they say more about the real bar than any timetable does.
Read these alongside, not instead of
The decision tool is still the service picker: select what you intend to provide and it returns the class, the capital floor and the extra evidence each service drags in. These pages explain why a given model tends to select a given set, including the ones founders do not realise they are selecting. What separates the classes themselves is on class 1 vs 2 vs 3, and what the capital figure actually resolves to is on capital.
One caution that applies to all five. The counts come from a register whose legal-basis column is optional, so a headline total mixes firms that went through an authorisation with licensed institutions that notified an extra activity. That gap is set out here, and every panel on these pages prints the split rather than the total alone.
That split also raises a question these five pages assume away. If you already hold a banking, investment firm, e-money, fund management or market operator licence, you may not be applying for anything at all. Authorisation or notification settles that first, and it is worth settling before you read any of the models below as a project plan.
Regulatory references on this page were read against the primary text on 23 October 2026. Every figure is held in the source register with the document it came from.