Strike Secures Full MiCA Licence, Joining Roughly One in Five EU Crypto Platforms

Strike's European entity, Zap (Strike) Europe Limited, has been authorised as a crypto-asset service provider by Malta's Financial Services Authority. The licence sits under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation and Malta's own Markets in Crypto Assets Act, and it replaces the country-by-country patchwork that previously governed where Strike could operate with a single passport covering all 27 EU member states.

The announcement, made on June 30, 2026, lands the same day Nexo confirmed its EEA service would continue uninterrupted by routing its regulated functions through licensed partners rather than securing the licence in its own name. Strike's news sits on the opposite end of that spectrum: the licence is Strike's, issued directly, with nothing leased.

What the licence actually changes

Strike has served eligible European customers since April 2024 without this authorisation in place, operating under the kind of national registration that MiCA's transitional rules allowed firms to rely on while applications moved through review.

That cover runs out tomorrow, July 1. From that date, a platform without a CASP licence cannot lawfully serve EU clients at all, and the services that depend on it for Strike span buying and selling bitcoin, fee-free recurring purchases, free on-chain withdrawals, private client services for high-net-worth customers, and dedicated business accounts. None of that changes in substance. What changes is the legal footing underneath it, and the geography it now covers without a second application.

Why the number matters more than the announcement

As of late May, 204 crypto-asset service providers held full CASP authorisation under MiCA, a count that includes major exchanges such as Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance alongside smaller specialists. Set against the roughly 1,200 firms that operated under pre-MiCA national registrations across the bloc, that puts the authorised share at somewhere close to one in five.

Ten EU member states had issued zero public CASP licences by June. Malta itself has drawn scrutiny over how it got there so fast: a European Securities and Markets Authority peer review in 2025 found the island's regulator only partially met expectations in how it had authorised at least one unnamed platform, flagging governance and anti-money-laundering concerns that should have been resolved before licensing rather than after. Malta's MFSA pushed back publicly, and no licence has been revoked as a result.

That context does not diminish what Strike secured. A MiCA licence issued today is the outcome of a process that the clear majority of firms that wanted one have not yet completed, through a regulator the EU's own supervisor has asked hard questions about and which kept issuing approvals anyway.

The Bitcoin-only bet, now with a passport

Strike's founder and chief executive, Jack Mallers, has built the company's identity around doing one thing, Bitcoin, rather than the multi-asset model most competitors run.

That positioning now carries regulatory weight it did not have a month ago: the same narrow product set can reach every EU customer through one authorisation, while other platforms still racing to clear the deadline face the choice of finishing the process, leaning on licensed partners, or losing EU access altogether.

Strike's claim to legitimacy in financial technology no longer rests on having operated in Europe since 2024. It rests on being one of the platforms that finished the paperwork before the deadline made finishing it the only option left.

Editor's note

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