Barcelona-based crypto app Venga announced on July 1, 2026 that it had received its MiCA license from Spain’s National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), becoming the first Catalan crypto investment platform to achieve this milestone.
Key Takeaways
- Venga secured a CASP (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) authorization from Spain’s CNMV, becoming Catalonia’s first licensed crypto investment platform.
- The CASP license lets Venga passport its services across all 27 European Union member states.
- According to Venga, around 250 companies received MiCA authorization out of roughly 1,200 crypto firms that previously operated across Europe’s fragmented national-registration regime.
- Venga’s Chief Compliance Officer Ana Carolina said roughly 50% of the licensing process, per CNMV’s licensing framework, was dedicated to customer-safety controls.
- The EU’s transitional period for pre-MiCA crypto firms, per ESMA’s transitional rules, ended the same day, requiring unauthorized providers to stop serving EU customers.
What Happened?
Venga said it previously held a VASP (Virtual Asset Service Provider) registration with the Bank of Spain before moving to full CASP status. A national VASP registration only covered Spain. CASP authorization is a single passport that lets Venga operate across all 27 EU member states without seeking approval in each one, per CNMV rules governing the license.
Founded in Barcelona in 2023, Venga offers its app in English, Spanish, and Catalan. Michael Stroev, CEO and co-founder of Venga, said:
MiCA introduces a level of regulatory accountability for users that has not previously existed, per Stroev. That accountability standard is tied directly to a hard deadline. Firms that provided crypto-asset services under national law before December 30, 2024, could keep operating until a MiCA authorization was granted or refused, per ESMA’s transitional rules, and that window closed the same day Venga’s license landed.
Venga’s authorization arrived ahead of the broader adoption shifts a single EU rulebook is likely to accelerate across the bloc.
We made it! 🇪🇺
— Venga (@Venga_App) July 1, 2026
Today marks one of the biggest turning points for the European crypto industry.
It’s the end of the MiCA transition period!
From now on, all companies offering regulated crypto services in the EU must hold a MiCA license.
And… 🥁
We’re proud to announce that… pic.twitter.com/2oOhnOigJF
A Sharp Culling of Europe’s Crypto Field
Around 1,200 crypto companies operated across Europe with more than 3,000 total national registrations before MiCA took effect. Only around 250 companies have received the MiCA license, by Venga’s own count. That gap leaves a large share of the field’s original size either still in the authorization queue or shut out of the EU market once the grace period lapsed.
The gap is why Venga frames the license as a milestone rather than routine paperwork. It places the company among a small minority of the roughly 1,200 firms that started the transition.
Inside the Compliance Build Behind the License
Ana Carolina, Chief Compliance Officer at Venga, said around 50% of the MiCA process is entirely dedicated to ensuring customer safety. She added: This process made the company significantly more mature. Everything we do now needs to be auditable.
That auditability requirement extends into system design, not just paperwork. Raul Arribas, CTO of Venga, said:
DORA, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, sets separate technology-risk and incident-reporting standards for financial firms. Arribas’s comment ties Venga’s engineering work to a separate EU rulebook the MiCA license alone does not cover.
The dual MiCA-DORA alignment suggests CASP authorization functions as more than a licensing checkbox. It forces the kind of operational-resilience discipline banks already carry, a meaningfully higher bar than the VASP registration Venga held before.
Implications for Europe’s Crypto Market
The end of the transitional period reshapes the competitive map immediately. Firms that relied on pre-MiCA national registrations and did not secure CASP authorization can no longer legally serve EU crypto customers.
A single CNMV authorization doing the work that once required separate sign-off in every EU country is the more durable story here than any one company’s announcement, and it gives early movers a head start building EU-wide user bases before the market resets around fewer, larger licensed players.
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
Venga’s license is small in isolation, but it lands at a structurally significant moment. The MiCA transitional period was designed to sort roughly 1,200 pre-existing operators down to a licensed core, and a two-year compliance buildout culminating on deadline day is the intended outcome, not an edge case.
The passporting mechanism matters more than the Catalan framing: a Barcelona-based platform can now serve a customer anywhere in the bloc under one authorization, with no repeat application.
The compliance substance behind the announcement points the same direction. Roughly half the licensing process aimed at customer-safety controls, plus a separate DORA architecture rebuild, indicates MiCA authorization works as an operational floor rather than a marketing label.
