Crypto exchange
The most expensive word in this sector. Two legally different businesses answer to it, they sit in different prudential classes, and firms routinely buy the wrong one.
Which of the two are you?
If you quote a price and the client trades against you, you are providing exchange of crypto-assets for funds or for other crypto-assets. Both are class 2 services with a capital floor of €125,000. If instead you run a system that brings together the buying and selling interests of third parties and matches them, you are operating a trading platform, which is class 3 at €150,000 and a different project entirely.
The test is not the user interface. An order book on the screen does not settle it, and neither does the word exchange in your company name. The test is whose balance sheet absorbs the trade. If the client's counterparty is you, it is exchange. If the client's counterparty is another client and you are standing in the middle running the matching, it is a platform, and the regulation treats you as venue infrastructure rather than as a dealer. What that costs.
The services this model actually selects
- Exchange of crypto-assets for funds. You quote a price and trade crypto against fiat on your own account. Class 2.
- Exchange of crypto-assets for other crypto-assets. You quote a price and trade one crypto-asset against another on your own account. Class 2.
- Providing custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients. You hold clients’ crypto-assets, or the means of access to them. Class 2, and almost unavoidable: if a client balance sits with you between trades, you are a custodian.
- Providing transfer services for crypto-assets on behalf of clients. You move crypto-assets from one address to another on a client instruction. Class 1, and it arrives the moment a client can withdraw to an external address.
The two exchange services are listed separately in the regulation and they are separately applied for, which surprises people who assume crypto-to-crypto is a lesser version of crypto-to-fiat. In the register they travel together almost without exception: of the 139 rows naming exchange for other crypto-assets, 137 also name exchange for funds. A pure crypto-to-crypto business is rare enough that it is worth asking why yours would be one.
What the European register shows for this permission
- Register rows naming it
- 189 across 26 home states
- Recorded as Article 63 authorisations
- 52
- Recorded as Article 60 notifications
- 14
- No legal basis recorded
- 123
- Held in Lithuania
- 3
Largest home states: France 22, Cyprus 20, Malta 17, Netherlands 15, Germany 14.
Most often held alongside: providing transfer services for crypto-assets on behalf of clients (152 of 189) , providing custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients (147 of 189) , exchange of crypto-assets for other crypto-assets (137 of 189) , execution of orders on behalf of clients (99 of 189) .
Counted from ESMA's interim register of crypto-asset service providers, file last updated 20 October 2026, counted 23 October 2026. The three basis figures do not sum to the total because the register's legal-basis column is optional and most national authorities leave it empty, Lithuania among them. Why that gap matters. Rows naming exchange of crypto-assets for funds are counted, whether or not the firm also holds other permissions.
What the application has to carry that others do not
Both exchange services pull in the same extra item, and it is the one applicants underestimate: non-discriminatory commercial policy and the methodology for determining price (article 62(2)(o)). The commercial policy has to be non-discriminatory and the pricing methodology has to be written down and defensible, which for a firm that has been quoting spreads by feel is a real piece of work. You are being asked to explain how you arrive at a price and to show that you do not arrive at different ones for comparable clients without a reason.
Add custody and the file grows again, because custody brings its own policy and the client-asset segregation that goes with it. The full Article 62(2) list sets out what sits underneath all of this.
What it actually costs to hold
The €125,000 class 2 floor is where most pages stop, and it is the lower half of the answer. Article 67 asks for the higher of that floor and one quarter of your annual fixed overheads, recalculated every year.
Article 67(1) requires prudential safeguards of at least the higher of the Annex IV minimum and one quarter of the preceding year’s fixed overheads, reviewed annually.
EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 (MiCA), consolidated text · Verified on 2026-09-14 · Next review 2027-03-14
For an exchange this bites earlier than for most models, because the cost base is front-loaded: liquidity operations, market data, a treasury function and a compliance team get you past €500,000 of fixed costs quickly, and from there the overheads limb governs. Run both limbs on your own numbers.
Where we would push back
Most firms that arrive describing themselves as an exchange are not operating a trading platform and do not need class 3. They are dealers with a good front end. If an adviser has quoted you for operating rules and a market-abuse detection system, ask them to point at the matching engine first, because that is what those documents exist to govern. The scarcity of the permission is the clue: across the whole register only 22 rows name a trading platform against 189 naming exchange for funds.
The opposite error is rarer and worse. If you do match third-party interest and you have been scoped as a dealer, nothing about the application will work, because the documents the authority expects for a venue are missing from the file entirely.
What this page could not verify
- Nobody's individual permission. The counts are of register rows naming a service. Whether a particular named firm trades on its own account or matches third parties is not something the register records, and we have not inferred it for any of them.
- No Lithuanian fee. The Bank of Lithuania does not publish an application or supervisory fee on the pages read, and the figures circulating on consultancy sites are held back as unverified. The source register lists what is held back and why.
- The register moves. Counted 23 October 2026 from a file ESMA last updated four days earlier.
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.