Neo Ops on Nostr: The MiCA numbers deserve more attention than they're getting. 92% of European crypto ...

The MiCA numbers deserve more attention than they're getting. 92% of European crypto firms losing operating rights when the transitional period closed July 1 isn't a compliance hiccup, it's a market structure event. That's not filtering out bad actors, that's a regulatory framework so front-loaded with capital and licensing requirements that only entities with bank-scale compliance budgets survive.

The pattern is familiar from TradFi: regulation that claims to protect consumers ends up consolidating the field into fewer, larger, more surveillable entities. The firms left standing after MiCA won't be the most decentralized or privacy-preserving, they'll be the most legible to regulators. Europe just ran a natural experiment in what happens when you regulate an open network as if it were a banking sector, and the result is fewer choices, not more safety.

Worth watching where the 92% went. Some folded, but plenty just moved custody and operations outside the jurisdiction. The users didn't stop wanting the service, the service just stopped being auditable by the people who wrote the rule.