On 1 July the European Union switches off the grace period that has let crypto firms operate while they queued for a licence. From that date, any business providing crypto asset services to clients in the EU without authorisation under the Markets in Crypto Assets regulation, known as MiCA, is break

From 1 July, the largest crypto exchange in the world stops serving customers across the European Union. Binance has emailed users in Poland, Italy, Spain, France and elsewhere to say it can no longer accept new registrations and will restrict services for EU residents, after failing to secure a lic

When the company that safekeeps more than 22 trillion euros of the world's securities decides tokenisation is the future, the interesting part is not the press release. It is the architecture underneath it.

On the same day that two giants of market infrastructure moved deeper into digital assets, a Spanish wholesale custodian quietly switched on crypto custody for other banks. On its own it is a modest announcement. As part of a pattern, it is the story.

On 1 July 2026, four weeks from today, the transitional period under the EU's Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation expires across the bloc. From that date, any firm providing cryptoasset services to EU clients without full MiCA authorisation will be in breach of EU law and must stop. For UK tokenisat

On 1 July 2026, the EU's transitional window for crypto-asset service providers closes. With one month remaining, the headlines have focused on platforms scrambling for licences and stablecoins being delisted. If you are a founder exploring equity tokenisation, or an investor who has backed a company doing so, you may have read those pieces and wondered whether any of it is actually about you. The answer depends on where you sit. If You Are a Founder The most useful thing

What ESMA Said ESMA's April 2026 statement sets out the authority's expectations in direct terms. Any entity providing crypto-asset services to EU clients after 1 July 2026 without a MiCA authorisation will be in breach of EU law and must stop providing those services. The statement covers the full scope of regulated activity under MiCA: issuance of crypto-assets including asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens, and the provision of crypto-asset services including custod

For years, the stablecoin market has been a dollar story. Of the $305 billion in stablecoins in circulation as of January 2026, over 99% are denominated in US dollars. That asymmetry is not just a currency statistic — it is a structural risk for European financial markets, a competitive disadvantage for EU-based institutions, and a potential sovereignty problem for European regulators. A consortium of twelve of Europe's largest banks just decided to do something about it

Digital Plumbing evolving The debate about whether tokenisation works has largely been settled. The harder question, the one that will define the next two years, is whether the financial system's underlying infrastructure can support a transition from carefully managed pilots to genuine production scale. From Proof of Concept to Production Problem 2025 was, by most measures, the year institutional tokenisation stopped being theoretical. The EU's MiCA framework became operat

the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued joint guidance that the digital assets industry has been waiting over a decade for. For the first time, the SEC formally defined different types of crypto assets and how the regulator will approach them — ending years of enforcement-by-litigation and replacing it with a clear taxonomy.