Spain’s top financial watchdog just made it clear: the July 1 MiCA deadline is not moving. No extensions. No exceptions.
Carlos San Basilio, chair of the Spanish National Securities Market Commission, told Reuters that crypto exchanges offering services to EU users must be licensed under the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework by that date, full stop. For Binance, that’s a serious problem.
Binance pulled its application with Greece’s capital markets commission and hasn’t secured approval from any other EU authority. If nothing changes in the next few days, the exchange will have to stop onboarding new EU users and scale back services for existing ones starting July 1.
Other exchanges have scrambled to get last-minute MiCA licenses — Poland’s Kanga exchange secured one through Latvia. But Binance has millions of EU users, so the impact of a shutdown would be far greater.
Basililio acknowledged the transition won’t be painless. “What we are concerned about is how this period will unfold,” he said. Regulators are in contact with companies that haven’t secured licenses yet.
OKX founder Mingxing Xu didn’t mince words about Binance’s approach, calling it out for ignoring regulations and misleading the public. He pointed to court filings linking Binance’s liquidity to money laundering and sanctions violations.
Some Binance users aren’t waiting around. Reddit threads show EU customers moving funds to Kraken, which holds a Crypto Asset Service Provider license through Ireland’s central bank.
The clock is ticking. If Binance can’t pull off a regulatory miracle before July, the EU crypto market is about to lose its biggest player.
