MiCA authorisation: 98 providers at BaFin, what matters in the ESMA register

A MiCA authorisation is the permission to offer crypto services in the European Union, and two public directories let you check whether your provider holds one: the company database of the German supervisor BaFin and the MiCA register of the European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA. The catch is that the two do not show the same thing. Anyone who looks only at BaFin will not find the big international exchanges there at all, and it is easy to draw the wrong conclusion from that. A count of our own from October 28, 2026 shows how large the difference is.