Webull MiCAR Approval: The Broker Keeps the Customer, Coinbase Runs the Trade

The Dutch markets authority has authorised a stockbroker to hold crypto for the customers it already has. Webull's MiCAR approval, announced from Amsterdam on 13 July 2026, means the next European retail investor to buy Bitcoin can do it inside the account they opened for exchange-traded funds, through the login they already use and under the regulator they already rely on.

Webull Securities (Europe) B.V. is the European arm of Webull Corporation, which reports more than 27 million registered users across 16 markets. It already held authorisation from the AFM (Autoriteit Financiële Markten), the Dutch financial markets authority, as an investment platform covering equities, fractional shares and exchange-traded funds. The MiCAR (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) approval places the same firm under a second regime, a position its European chief executive, Andries van Luijk, describes as among the first dual-regulated approvals of its kind in the Netherlands.

The approval, the timeline, and the year that preceded it

Crypto operations are planned for late 2026, with initial approval limited to the Netherlands and passporting to the rest of the European Union still pending. The authorisation lands at the end of a licensing year that has pushed exchanges out of European markets rather than welcoming them in, including Binance's MiCA failure, which closed regulated services to its Italian customers on 1 July.

Coinbase executes, Webull keeps the customer

According to Webull's MiCAR announcement, customers will transmit crypto orders through the Webull platform, Webull EU will provide regulated custody of the assets, and execution will be carried out through a partnership with Coinbase Luxembourg S.A. Coinbase earns the flow while Webull holds the custody, the account statement and the screen the customer is looking at when they press buy. An exchange running the execution layer inside another firm's brokerage keeps the revenue and disappears from the customer's field of vision.

The barrier this removes is social, not technical

A professional in their late thirties who has never bought crypto has usually been stopped by the second account, the second identity check, and the quiet self-description that arrives with installing a crypto app. Rakuten reached 44 million Japanese consumers by converting loyalty points into crypto without asking any of them to make a crypto decision, and a brokerage account with a crypto tab works on the same principle. Access placed inside a familiar product does more for adoption than any argument made about the asset.

Brokers and exchanges are building the same account from opposite ends

Binance travelled in the other direction in June, letting 320 million users buy stocks from crypto wallets, fractional NVIDIA included. Both firms are assembling a single account that holds every asset class a retail investor might want, and whoever owns the account a customer opens first will sell them everything that comes afterwards.

What the customer gains and what they hand over

Under MiCAR, crypto held in that account carries custody, conduct and disclosure obligations supervised by the same authority the customer already relies on for shares, which gives European recourse to holdings that would otherwise sit on an offshore venue. Crypto is arriving on the financial technology rails that already carry funds and equities, and the protections travel with the rails. The customer gives up discretion in return, because the broker selects which assets appear on the menu and which venue executes them.

Adoption at scale belongs to the firms that let people buy crypto without ever feeling like the sort of person who buys crypto. Webull now holds the licence to be one of them.

Editor's note

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