Greece's financial regulator HCMC plans to reject Binance's MiCA licence application, as Reuters exclusively reported citing two insiders. Without approval by 1 July 2026, the world's largest crypto exchange would have to halt all services for EU customers.
MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) is the EU's unified licensing regime for crypto service providers, fully in force since December 2024. A MiCA CASP licence serves as an EU passport for all 27 member states as well as the three EEA countries Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Binance had filed its application on 23 January 2026 with the Hellenic Capital Market Commission and established the holding company Binary Greece for that purpose. Co-CEO Richard Teng had previously chosen Greece deliberately as the company's EU regulatory base, citing the country's labour pool and its security profile relative to larger financial centres. With an average daily volume of USD 11.9 billion, the exchange is moreover the world's largest centralised trading venue. To assess the application, the HCMC brought in external advisers, among them PwC, Deloitte and KPMG.
Subscribe to our newsletter
The best articles of the week, directly delivered into your mailbox.
Binance disputes the MiCA licence rejection
The Reuters report draws on two people familiar with the matter, who describe a planned rejection of the application. However, the sources did not name concrete reasons for the looming refusal. The HCMC itself declined to comment, citing confidentiality rules, and the authority has so far not communicated any formal decision.
Binance, however, contests this account. A company spokesperson stated that the HCMC had completed its review of the application and assessed it as MiCA-compliant. In addition, the authority had given no formal signal to the contrary. As a result, two irreconcilable accounts now stand side by side. The comparison with an earlier report shows just how volatile the information situation is. As recently as 4 June 2026, AML Intelligence had reported that Greece was close to granting Binance the licence. Twelve days later, the Reuters account therefore contradicts that picture fundamentally.
MiCA deadline expires and without a licence an EU-wide ban follows
The MiCA transition period ends on 1 July 2026, and ESMA confirmed explicitly on 17 April 2026 that there would be no extension. The transition rule allows providers already active beforehand to keep operating until the licensing decision or until the cut-off date, whichever comes first. For Binance that means a formal rejection would end operations immediately, otherwise the deadline applies. There is no room for a subsequent extension.
Without a valid licence, Binance would have to halt all services for EU customers from July. Providers operating without approval moreover face fines of up to EUR 5 million or a percentage share of annual revenue, whichever amount is higher. Furthermore, ESMA expects unauthorised actors to submit orderly wind-down plans that let customers transfer their crypto assets to licensed providers or into self-custody. France's AMF had additionally already signalled criminal prosecution for continued activity without approval from July 2026.
While Binance waits for a decision, its main competitors obtained their authorisation long ago. Coinbase is licensed in Ireland, Kraken in Luxembourg and Ireland, OKX and Crypto.com in Malta, alongside Bitvavo in the Netherlands as well as Bitpanda, Bitstamp and Revolut. By country, Germany led licensing with twelve approvals, followed by the Netherlands with eleven and Malta with five. According to estimates, however, only around 210 of the more than 1,200 former VASP registrations had received MiCA authorisation by May 2026, which corresponds to a share of roughly 17%. The bottleneck therefore extends well beyond Binance.
Greece as a calculated regulatory location and its limits
Teng's choice of location followed a clear logic. Because the licence is largely uniform across Europe, other factors proved decisive for Binance. Social aspects, the labour pool and security questions spoke, in the company's view, in favour of Greece as a location away from the major financial centres. Teng himself explicitly left it to the EU in February 2026 to decide whether Binance would receive the licence by the July deadline.
Greece, however, had not yet granted a single MiCA CASP licence by mid-January 2026. The fact that the HCMC brought in PwC, Deloitte and KPMG for the review underscores the unusual effort for an authority still inexperienced in this field. A rejection would therefore also be one of its first major CASP decisions of any kind.
Binance is already familiar with regulatory setbacks in Europe. France's AMF listed the company in January 2026 among 89 unlicensed crypto firms, and in several EU countries the exchange had previously lost authorisations or ceased operations. Teng himself took over the co-CEO post in November 2023, shortly after the USD 4.3 billion US settlement under former chief Changpeng Zhao. That settlement set the exchange on a course more strongly geared toward regulatory compliance. Previously, Teng had worked as a regulator in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, which makes the Greek application appear as a deliberate step toward full compliance.
Binance's MiCA licence on the brink and what follows now
A formal rejection is still pending, because Reuters so far reports only that the application faces refusal. The authority has not communicated any official decision, and the concrete reasons remain unknown. As long as no formal notice exists, Binance can initially continue its operations within the transition rule.
Several options therefore remain open for the exchange. It could appeal against the decision, file a new application in another EU country, or withdraw from the market with an orderly wind-down plan. Each of these paths, however, sits under considerable time pressure ahead of 1 July 2026. Globally, Binance counts more than 300 million users, although a reliable breakdown for the EU market is not available.
Binance would thus be, for the foreseeable future, the only one of the major crypto exchanges without a MiCA licence. In the stablecoin segment a comparable pattern emerges: while Circle with USDC and Société Générale are licensed, Tether's USDT still counts as non-MiCA-compliant and has been delisted by EU exchanges. On a market of an estimated 450 million citizens across the EU and EEA, an exclusion therefore means a considerable competitive disadvantage for the exchange.
