The Lithuanian CASP licence, from the applicant's side

Start from the activity, not the licence

Almost every mistake in this process starts with an applicant deciding they want "a crypto licence" and working backwards. The regulation does not issue that. It authorises named services, and the set you pick determines your capital floor, the policies you have to write and the people you have to hire.

So the first question is narrow and concrete. When a client hands you value, whose balance sheet is it on, who can move it, and what do you do with it? Answer that honestly and the service classification usually writes itself. The service picker turns the answer into a class and a capital floor.

What changed, and when

Anything written before that date describing a Lithuanian registration route is describing a regime that no longer exists. That includes a good deal of material still ranking for these queries.

Who has actually cleared the bar

The identity of those four is more instructive than the count. Two are subsidiaries of established international financial groups, one is a payments processor with roughly a decade of history, and the fourth is backed by a licensed finance brokerage. Every one had a regulated parent, a real operating record, or both. There is no rule requiring that, but it is the observable pattern, and it is worth looking at in full.

The four things the assessment turns on

1. Prudential position. The higher of the Annex IV floor and a quarter of your fixed overheads, at all times, reviewed annually. How to work it out.
2. Establishment. A registered office in a Member State where you carry out at least part of the services, effective management in the Union, at least one Union-resident director. What that does and does not require.
3. Governance and people. Repute, collective competence and demonstrable time commitment on the management body; qualifying holders traced through to natural persons. The evidence involved.
4. Controls that exist rather than adopted. Article 68(4) asks for policies "sufficiently effective to ensure compliance". A bought policy pack passes the completeness check and fails the assessment.

The timetable, briefly

Roughly 65 working days of statutory maximum, plus up to 20 suspended while the authority waits on a request for information. The preparation that precedes filing is governed by none of those periods and is where the schedule is actually decided. Stage by stage.

What ends an application

Two different things, and they are worth separating. Refusal on the merits comes from the four mandatory grounds in Article 63(10), management body, individual suitability, qualifying holders, or failing any requirement of the Title. Separately, an application still incomplete after the authority's deadline may simply not be reviewed at all. The grounds in detail.

What the authorisation is worth once you have it

This is the commercial case for the whole exercise: one authorisation, notified onward, and you may serve clients across the Union without a local entity, office or licence in any of those markets. How the notification runs.