OKX and Bitpanda: Contrasting Paths to MICA Compliance in Europe

One after the other, two major foreign platforms distributing crypto have announced that they have obtained their MiCA license. On one side, there is OKX, headquartered in the Seychelles and with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States, which obtained its Mica license from the Maltese authorities. And on the other side, Bitpanda, a cryptocurrency broker that obtained its license from the German Federal Financial Authority. However, Bitpanda and OKX situations are far from similar.

MiCA license: Differences between Bitpanda and OKX

On the Bitpanda side, the MiCA license was officially obtained by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority of Germany (BaFin). And if obtaining Mica opens up prospects for the group of Austrian origin which already claims more than 5 million users, it will not change its mode of operation.

The company already has 17 regulatory licenses in Europe with offices in Amsterdam, Barcelona, ​​Berlin and Bucharest and representatives all over the EU, maintaining dialogue with professional associations and regulatory authorities in place.

Because, and this is an important point: if the Mica license issued by the company’s country of origin within the EU does indeed give access to all the countries of EU, it is necessary to make oneself “known” to the regulatory authorities of the country in which one wishes to “passport”

“The crypto-asset service provider may start providing crypto-asset services in a Member State other than its home Member State no later than the 15th calendar day after having provided the information on its passport application to the authority of its home Member State. It is the latter which makes the link with the authority of the host Member State and communicates to it the information on the passport (nature of the services in particular),” explained the AMF.

In this respect, the situation of OKX, the subject is a bit more delicate

After having tried to obtain PSAN approval in France, OKX chose Malta as its European rear base last fall. After obtaining its MICA license, OKX immediately announced via press release that it was now operational on the French market. Which is not the case to date (January 28).

A small mess therefore for the OKX platform which is perhaps wiping the plaster of a regulation which sees its first applications there.

Founded in 2017 by Star Xu, the company now has MiCA licenses in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Singapore. It claims 60 million users worldwide, as well as the place of second platform in the world in terms of trading volume.

Despite its size and surely the means to be accompanied, OKX will have to wait a few more days to deploy its services in France and beyond within the EU, which should not be long.

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(Featured image by Kanchanara via Unsplash)

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First published in Finyear. A third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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