MiCA Shakeout Leaves Wealth Managers Exposed on Crypto Reporting.

Europe’s crypto industry has just been through its first real culling. When the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets transition period closed on 1 July 2026, only 244 crypto-asset service providers held a full MiCA licence, against more than 3,000 firms that had been registered under national regimes as recently as 2024, according to CoinDesk’s reporting on the deadline.

A day later, the UK moved in the same direction. On 30 June 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority published its final rules for the new cryptoasset regime, covering trading venues, custodians, stablecoin issuers and firms that arrange staking. Applications open on 30 September 2026, and the regime takes full effect on 25 October 2027.

Crypto is being folded into the same supervisory machinery as equities, bonds and funds. For wealth managers, that is where the problem starts: many cannot yet report crypto holdings with the completeness regulators expect from every other asset class.

Only 244 firms cleared MiCA

Germany issued the most licences, 57, followed by France with 26, according to CoinDesk. Most of the roughly 3,000 firms trading under transitional national permissions did not make it through.

Erald Ghoos, chief executive of OKX Europe, told CoinDesk he expects as many as 80% of Europe’s crypto firms not to survive the transition, largely because compliance costs run well beyond the application itself, an operator’s estimate rather than a regulator’s figure.

Poland shows how uneven the effect has been: roughly 1,400 pre-MiCA registrations produced, per CoinDesk, a single MiCA-licensed firm. Binance itself missed the deadline in several EU states and has been paring back services there, Fintechly reported in June.

FCA rules add a second deadline

The FCA’s rules, set out under PS26/11, land a day after MiCA’s cut-off and bring trading platforms, intermediaries, custodians, stablecoin issuers and staking arrangers inside FSMA.

 David Geale, the FCA’s executive director for payments and digital finance, said the regime would give firms “a stable, competitive home to build and grow.” Informal arrangements and national exemptions are closing on both sides of the Channel; formal authorisation, with the reporting and governance that comes with it, is the only route left open.

The wealth managers crypto reporting gap

None of this would matter much to wealth managers if crypto stayed at the edge of client portfolios. It no longer does. A shakeout this size forces client assets to move, and a wealth manager who cannot show a clean record of what a client holds, where it is custodied and what it is worth is exposed in a way unthinkable for a bond or equity position.

The mechanics are specific to crypto. Holdings sit across multiple wallets and custodians rather than one nominee account, positions need tracking at the blockchain address level, and staking income does not settle to cash automatically: it accrues in tokens on a protocol’s own schedule and has to be priced as it arrives. Traditional systems were not built for any of that.

The pressure is rising because institutional money keeps arriving. The 2026 Institutional Investor Digital Assets survey run by EY-Parthenon and Coinbase, which polled 351 decision-makers in January 2026, found regulatory compliance had become a bigger factor in choosing a custodian, cited by 66% of respondents against 25% a year earlier, as CoinDesk reported.

Vendors are starting to close the gap

 Data and portfolio infrastructure providers are starting to build for the problem. WealthArc, a Zurich-based data infrastructure provider for wealth managers, external asset managers and family offices, is one example: on 2 July 2026 it announced crypto as a fully modelled asset class within its platform, as reported by Finextra.

 Custody data now comes through direct feeds from Anchorage Digital, BitGo and Tetra Trust rather than aggregated third-party sources, and pricing runs through CoinGecko across more than 17,000 digital assets. A dedicated Staking Rewards transaction type records token income, with support for fees, commissions, tax and withholding deductions.

“Crypto positions introduce data challenges that are structurally different from traditional assets, including multiple wallets, blockchain-level address tracking, and staking income that does not settle against a cash account,” said Radomir Mastalerz, WealthArc’s chief technology officer. “Wealth managers should be able to present a complete portfolio view to every client, whether those clients hold equities, bonds, or Bitcoin.”

WealthArc is not the only provider working on this. Clients whose exchanges and custodians lost their licences overnight may already be moving assets elsewhere, and firms serving crypto-holding clients in the UK have until the FCA’s 30 September 2026 application window to decide whether their reporting can withstand the same scrutiny as everything else in the portfolio.