Germany Leads MiCA Approvals as Loopring DEX Closes; BIS Warns

Data from the European Securities and Markets Authority’s interim register, compiled Friday, shows Germany has 57 of the 244 crypto-asset service provider authorizations recorded so far under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regime. France follows with 26 approvals and the Netherlands is also a significant host for license activity. The MiCA framework is due to take effect on Wednesday, with a transitional deadline for some provisions set for July 1. The latest batch of CASP licenses covered the period from June 18 to June 25, 2026.

Regulators and market participants report uneven licensing across national authorities, with firms appearing to concentrate applications in member states that have clearer or faster procedures. MiCA creates a single legal framework for entities such as trading platforms and custodial wallet providers to operate across the European Economic Area, but current authorizations are clustered in a few jurisdictions.

Loopring, an early zero-knowledge rollup built for Ethereum, announced on Sunday that it has closed its decentralized exchange and automated market maker and halted its relayer with immediate effect. The team wrote on X that the project failed to gain meaningful user adoption, lacked business development capacity, and was overtaken by newer zkEVM-style solutions. “To be honest, Loopring never gained meaningful adoption,” the post read, adding that the platform lacked a virtual machine, which limited composability and real-world payment use cases.

Loopring raised $45 million in a 2017 initial coin offering and served as an early technical demonstration that zero-knowledge proofs could help scale Ethereum. Over time, successor technologies such as zkSync, Scroll and StarkNet introduced additional features and developer tooling. Public metrics show Loopring’s total value locked has declined over the past five years.

The Bank for International Settlements published its Annual Economic Report on Sunday and warned that the roughly $316 billion stablecoin market poses risks to the global monetary system. The report states that tokens pegged to fiat currencies generally lack the institutional safeguards required to function as reliable money at large scale, and it highlights vulnerabilities in how reserve assets for stablecoins are managed.

The BIS said a significant shift of funds from commercial bank deposits into privately issued digital tokens could reduce bank funding and constrain credit to households and businesses. The report recommends accelerating work on tokenized central bank money and tokenized commercial bank money and calls for policy and infrastructure changes to address reserve composition and operational resilience.

MiCA is the EU’s first comprehensive legal framework for crypto assets and requires crypto-asset service providers to secure authorization to operate within the EEA. Stablecoins are widely used for trading and payments within crypto markets and operate without many of the safeguards present in traditional banking. Loopring’s closure is a rare example of a high-profile early layer-2 project ending trading services as newer technical approaches gain adoption.