For a long time the running joke in crypto was that compliance came after product-market fit. Nobody’s laughing at that one anymore.
This year the regulators caught up, and founders felt it directly: registrations pulled in batches, a European deadline that didn’t budge, and a US bill that almost everyone assumed would pass and didn’t.
So if you run a crypto business, or you’re about to launch one, most of the news that mattered in 2026 was really licensing news. Canada, the EU and the US tell most of the story.
Canada: getting registered is easy, staying registered isn’t
Most people in the industry call it a licence, though technically FINTRAC registers money services businesses rather than licensing them.
Whatever you call it, the Canadian MSB licensing process applies to anyone dealing in virtual currency: exchanges, custodial wallets, crypto ATM operators, payment processors.
Firms outside the country that serve Canadians register as foreign MSBs. There’s no fee, and a clean file usually goes through in a few weeks.
A year of revocations
The trouble starts later. On March 17, FINTRAC revoked 23 registrations in a single announcement, every one of them a crypto business, and two with no physical presence in Canada at all.
By May 21 the public registry showed 151 revocations for 2026, and 117 of those firms listed virtual currency among their services. Vancouver alone accounted for 58.
What surprises founders is how ordinary the reasons are. A missed deadline on an information request. An address that never got updated. No named compliance officer. Nobody has to be laundering money to lose their registration.
The penalties aren’t small, either. FINTRAC fined Cryptomus $126 million in October 2025 and KuCoin $14 million the month before.
Stablecoins now have their own regulator
Stablecoin issuers have an extra layer to deal with. The Stablecoin Act, passed with Bill C-15 on March 26, makes the Bank of Canada their supervisor and requires issuers to be on its public registry before they issue anything.
FINTRAC has said they’ll need MSB registration as well. The detailed rules are still being drafted and are expected to land between late 2026 and 2027.
Europe and the US went opposite ways
MiCA’s grace period is over
In Europe the deadline actually held. MiCA’s transitional period ended on July 1, and ESMA left no wiggle room: no authorisation means no EU clients, and a pending application doesn’t count. In mid-June roughly 210 firms held a CASP authorisation. More than 1,200 had held national registrations before MiCA.
The register has kept growing since (around 325 by mid-August), but the firms that missed the cutoff are now winding down, handing clients to licensed competitors, or trying to buy one.
Washington stalls, again
The US had the opposite problem: plenty of momentum and still no law. On September 15 the Senate voted 49 to 50 against opening debate on the CLARITY Act, the bill that would split crypto oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. It needed 60.
The fight was mostly over ethics rules for officials’ crypto holdings, and four Republicans voted no alongside the Democrats.
A motion to reconsider keeps the bill technically alive, but prediction markets dropped its odds of becoming law this year into single digits. The GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law signed in 2025, isn’t affected.
What this means for crypto businesses?
Registration is the easy bit
Every revocation story this year follows the same pattern. A firm got on the register, then stopped treating the regulator as someone who might write back.
Answer information requests on time. File an update when an address, owner or director changes. Keep a named compliance officer and a written program that someone has actually read.
Plan for more than one regulator
A Canadian exchange with European customers now needs FINTRAC registration, possibly a Quebec licence on top, and either its own MiCA authorisation or a licensed partner in the EU. Issue a stablecoin and the Bank of Canada joins the list.
Banking will probably take longer than any of it. That was true before 2026, and nothing this year changed it.
Where this leaves things?
Across all three markets, regulators have stopped issuing warnings and started acting on them. The firms still on the registers tend to budget for compliance the way they budget for rent or payroll, as a fixed cost of being in business. Plenty of others found out this year what a revocation notice looks like.
