MiCA Decoded: A European Regulation? White Paper Data Says Something Else

When one thinks about the MiCA regulation, it is usually about the EU, where it applies directly. That framing is technically correct: it is a European framework for regulating European markets. However, in practice, it is misleading to call it purely European.

Filing a white paper to have a token admitted for trading in Europe does not require a European address, and the European Securities and Market Authority (ESMA) public registers tell a story that most founders have not yet read.

Based on a study LegalBison conducted at the end of February for its clients, the numbers are pretty surprising.

MiCA governs where tokens are admitted for trading and by whom they are offered, not where the companies behind them are incorporated. That design choice is what produces the data above, and it has significant practical consequences for any offshore project evaluating its EU market access strategy.

In simple terms: If you have a utility token or ‘other token’ as per narrow MiCA definition launched from a non-EU country like the BVIs, Panama, Cayman Islands or others, you are still able to have your token be admitted for trading in the EU.

In this second piece of our MiCA Decoded series, we share findings from the MiCA registry of issued crypto-assets.

Under MiCA, any party seeking to offer a crypto-asset to EU investors or have it admitted to trading on an EU exchange must publish a compliant white paper. The obligation falls primarily on the offeror or the person seeking admission to trading, rather than the original issuer of the token. This is an important distinction: the issuer is the entity that created the crypto-asset, while the offeror is the entity actively offering it to the public in the EU. In many decentralized projects, there is no identifiable centralized issuer at all, but the party offering the token to the market must still ensure regulatory compliance.

MiCA also allows a trading platform to take on that responsibility, either on its own initiative or by written agreement with the project team.

That second path is what most early analyses of MiCA missed. Large exchanges built internal processes to file white papers for every token they offer for EU customers. Kraken’s EU entity, authorized in Ireland, filed 133 such records by itself. LCX, operating from Liechtenstein, filed 63. A German compliance provider filed 88 records on behalf of token projects, with no exchange role of its own.

Now, strip out those 284 proxy and compliance-provider filings and 477 records remain: token projects that engaged directly with a national regulator to satisfy the white paper requirement for EU access. These are not CASP license holders. They are token issuers taking on a disclosure obligation: a different, much simpler and narrower commitment.

Of those 477, only 73 confirm an EU or EEA head office.

The rest are offshore entities reaching into the European market through a targeted regulatory filing, not through a corporate relocation.

The 477 independent filings concentrate in two jurisdictions. Ireland lists 151 white papers, issued from 147 distinct entities. Malta holds 145 white papers from 95 entities.

The range of what is being filed in each jurisdiction is worth examining closely. Ireland’s filer list includes:

Malta’s list includes:

Neither jurisdiction shows a category preference. The breadth of filings in both places reflects the full variety of tokens that European exchanges are currently listing.

For offshore entities choosing between the two, the practical difference comes down to what each regulatory environment actually looks like in practice.

Ireland offers an English-language process inside a jurisdiction with a deep technology sector track record. One entity out of 147 Irish filers has an Irish head office, which confirms the pattern clearly: Ireland is not a corporate home for these projects, only a point of regulatory access. The British Virgin Islands alone accounts for 47 of the 116 Irish filers with known head offices (41%), noting that 31 Irish filers have no known headquarter, by the register’s data.

It is worth noting that at the moment of writing the Central Bank of Ireland is not charging a processing fee in comparison to most other National Competent Authorities (NCAs) to have projects seek admission for trading.

Malta tells a different story. Twenty of its 95 entities have a Maltese head office, reflecting a decade of crypto-specific regulation that produced a local ecosystem of compliance professionals and legal advisors whose practices are built around this industry. For projects that want proximity to that ecosystem rather than just a filing address, Malta tends to produce a different kind of regulatory engagement.

MiCA classifies crypto-assets in three categories:

The EMT register contains 36 records as of March 12th of 2026.

That number is not low by accident. Issuing an EMT under MiCA requires prior authorization as an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) or a credit institution. A local entity is mandatory and high capital and solvency requirements filter out startups at the entry point. The entities in the register are banks and licensed payment institutions, not token-native projects.

The geographic distribution reflects that structure:

For founders: the EMT market as MiCA has structured it is an institutional product category. Any project exploring fiat-pegged token issuance under MiCA is entering a market defined by Circle, Societe Generale, and Paxos, not by early-stage teams.

An ART is a token whose value references a basket of assets rather than a single currency.

The MiCA registers contain 761 other-crypto-asset white papers and 36 EMT (Electronic Money Token) white papers. The ART (Asset-Referenced Token) row reads zero.

That zero is not an anomaly. The authorization path is structurally more demanding than other MiCA categories: capital requirements can reach 2% of average outstanding reserve asset value, and the authorization process is far more rigorous than for standard token issuance.

No entity has completed that process anywhere in the EU. Whether the explanation is market preference, regulatory complexity, capital cost, or a strategic preference for structures outside MiCA’s scope entirely, the register does not say. It only confirms the outcome.