Germany MiCA authorisations reached 79 crypto asset service providers (CASPs) after the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) updated its interim register on 21 August 2026, adding six German cooperative banks in a single batch.
The six additions were Raiffeisenbank Aidlingen, Ihre Volksbank, VR-Bank Mittelfranken Mitte, Volksbank Euskirchen, VR Bank Ried-Überwald, and Volksbank Backnang. The update brings the EU-wide total to 331 authorised CASPs, with Germany now holding a substantial gap over France (35) and the Netherlands (29).
Germany’s count has grown from 57 in late June, a roughly 39% increase in under two months. France and the Netherlands are not closing that gap at a comparable pace.
Why Germany MiCA Authorisations Keep Climbing
The mechanics behind Germany’s lead are structural. Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) told Cointelegraph in June that the volume partly reflects Germany’s large financial sector and the number of credit institutions already eligible to offer crypto services. A pre-existing national licensing regime also gave certain CASPs access to simplified authorisation procedures during the MiCA transition.
The cooperative banking sector illustrates this dynamic well. Germany has several hundred Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank institutions, many of which were already regulated credit institutions under German law. For them, layering on a MiCA CASP authorisation is an administrative step, not a business-model transformation.
Under MiCA, an authorised CASP can passport services across the entire EU without seeking separate authorisation in each member state. That passporting right, which BaFin’s own guidance confirms, gives any German-licensed institution access to a market of roughly 450 million people from a single authorisation. The cooperative banks in this latest batch are therefore not just domestic names.
MiCA sets three tiers of minimum capital for CASPs. According to the ESMA interactive rulebook, Class 1 activities (execution of orders, advice, portfolio management) require €50,000; Class 2 (adding custody or exchange services) requires €125,000; and Class 3 (operating a trading platform) requires €150,000. For established cooperative banks with existing capital buffers, none of those thresholds are the binding constraint.
ESMA Tightens the Screws as the Register Grows
The expanding CASP count is running alongside a more assertive ESMA. On 23 June 2026, the regulator published a public statement calling on unauthorised providers to wind down EU activities in an orderly manner following the end of the MiCA transitional period on 1 July 2026, with an explicit requirement to safeguard client interests during any exit.
More recently, ESMA’s June and July 2026 newsletter confirmed the launch of a Common Supervisory Action (CSA) targeting the digital operational resilience of CASPs, with custody services as the focal point. That is a direct signal to the custody-heavy cooperative bank entrants: authorisation is the starting line, not the finish.
ESMA’s peer review of Malta’s CASP authorisation process, published in July 2025, adds further texture. The review found that some material issues were not fully resolved when Malta’s financial regulator granted authorisation and that certain risk areas were inadequately assessed. ESMA used the Malta findings to issue a sector-wide recommendation: all national competent authorities authorising CASPs should pay particular attention to business growth trajectories, conflicts of interest, governance and intragroup arrangements, ICT architecture, and the promotion of unregulated services alongside regulated ones.
That last point applies directly to institutions with wide product ranges. A cooperative bank offering traditional deposit accounts, mortgages, and now crypto custody under the same roof carries exactly the governance and intragroup complexity ESMA flagged.
Elsewhere on the register, ESMA’s asset-referenced token (ART) dataset remained empty, the electronic money token (EMT) register held 43 entries, and the non-compliant entity list stayed at 167. The ART register staying empty is the more telling number: issuers of stablecoins backed by asset baskets have either not applied or not yet passed scrutiny.
With the transitional period closed and the CSA on custody underway, the next update to watch is whether ESMA begins moving names from the authorised register to the non-compliant list at a faster pace than new entrants are added.
