A legal person authorised to provide crypto-asset services to third parties on a professional basis — custody, exchange operation, order execution, placement, transfer services, and advice — as defined by the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA); CASPs must obtain authorisation, meet prudential and governance requirements, and comply with anti-money-laundering and travel-rule obligations, gaining passporting rights across the EU single market.
Semantic Classification
Content
Definition
A crypto-asset service provider (CASP) is the EU regulatory category, created by the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (EU MiCA Regulation), for firms that professionally provide services around crypto-assets to third parties. MiCA enumerates ten services: custody and administration of crypto-assets; operation of a trading platform; exchange of crypto-assets for funds or for other crypto-assets; execution of orders; placing of crypto-assets; reception and transmission of orders; advice; portfolio management; and transfer services. Any firm offering these in the EU must be authorised by a national competent authority, after which the licence passports across all member states — replacing the previous patchwork of national virtual-asset registrations with a single harmonised regime, in force for CASPs from 30 December 2024.
Authorisation carries substantive obligations modelled on MiFID-style financial regulation: minimum own funds (from EUR 50,000 to EUR 150,000 by service class, plus prudential buffers), fit-and-proper management, custody safeguarding rules including segregation of client assets and liability for lost assets, conflict-of-interest management, complaint handling, and market-abuse provisions covering insider dealing and manipulation in crypto markets. CASPs are also “obliged entities” under the EU anti-money-laundering framework, so they implement Know Your Customer onboarding and transaction monitoring, and the recast Transfer Of Funds Regulation applies the FATF “travel rule” — originator and beneficiary information must accompany crypto transfers without a minimum threshold.
The CASP concept is the EU’s counterpart to the FATF’s globally used term virtual asset service provider (VASP); exchanges such as Cryptocurrency Exchange operators (Kraken, Coinbase, Bitstamp among the early licensees) and custodians are the archetypal CASPs, but the definition deliberately spans advisory and brokerage-style firms as well.
Current Landscape
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Transitional period over: the MiCA grandfathering window (up to 18 months, varying by member state) expired EU-wide on 1 July 2026; ESMA’s public statements of December 2025 and June 2026 required unauthorised CASPs to implement orderly wind-down plans and warned investors to check the ESMA Interim MiCA Register
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Licensing wave and consolidation: roughly 216 firms held MiCA CASP authorisation by June 2026 (KPMG, from the ESMA register) against more than 1,200 previously operating under national registrations; by 20 July 2026 the register showed ~295 active authorisation records, about 70% of which include custody authorisation — Germany (55), the Netherlands (26), France (19), Malta (15), Cyprus and Ireland (12 each) lead as hub jurisdictions, and roughly a quarter of authorisations landed in June 2026 alone
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Supervisory architecture: national competent authorities license and supervise CASPs, with ESMA and the EBA issuing technical standards (ESMA ran a fast-track peer review of Malta’s CASP authorisation practice in July 2025 and launched a Common Supervisory Action on custody); the new EU AMLA authority is assuming AML oversight of the riskiest cross-border CASPs
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Beyond the EU: the UK’s analogous regime is now legislated — the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 were made on 4 February 2026, the FCA authorisation window runs from 30 September 2026 to 28 February 2027, and the full regime takes effect on 25 October 2027; FATF mutual evaluations track VASP regulation globally, making CASP-style licensing the de facto international norm
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Open issues: treatment of fully decentralised protocols (formally out of MiCA scope), reverse solicitation boundaries, and the interaction between CASP custody rules and institutional digital-asset custody practice
Sources:
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https://pharosproduction.com/insights/engineering/esma-casp-register-after-mica-deadline/
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https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/cryptoasset-regime