MICA TURNS IBERIA INTO A TOLLGATE

António Henriques, Chief Executive Officer of Bison Bank in Lisbon, described the absorption of his crypto subsidiary into the bank's main structure as a natural move driven by MiCA, and that framing reveals something precise about what the regulation actually does to market structure.

MiCA does not simply create rules. It creates a cost floor that only certain kinds of firms can clear.

In Spain, the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores closed the Bank of Spain's legacy registry to new applicants on 30 December 2024 and assumed sole responsibility for authorisation. The application demands more than 100 pages of disclosure covering governance, shareholder structures, and risk management, paired with minimum capital thresholds of between 125.000 euros and 350.000 euros depending on services offered. Companies that fail to obtain authorisation by 1 July 2026 must cease operations entirely.

Of the roughly 136 firms that had registered in the Bank of Spain's virtual asset service provider registry, the first MiCA licence went to BBVA in March 2025. By March 2026, CaixaBank and Openbank, owned by Santander, had joined the list. Coty de Monteverde, Group Vice President of Crypto and Blockchain at Banco Santander, confirmed the Openbank launch publicly at Merge Madrid 2025, describing an approach of starting with a few tokens and expanding as the regulatory framework allows. These firms moved first because they already had the compliance infrastructure to move at all.

The one crypto-native firm to survive in Spain, Bit2Me, did so only after Tether led a 30.000.000 euro funding round in August 2025, acquiring a minority equity stake. Leif Ferreira, Chief Executive Officer of Bit2Me, described the MiCA authorisation from the CNMV as a testament to transparency and trust, though the capital behind that commitment came from the world's largest stablecoin issuer, not from the firm's own balance sheet.

In Portugal, Law 69/2025 arrived on 22 December 2025, two years after MiCA entered into force. Mário Amorim Lopes, a Member of Parliament for Liberal Initiative, noted during the transposition debate that some firms had already sought other jurisdictions during that delay. Bison Bank moved within weeks of the law's publication, merging its crypto subsidiary, building real-world asset tokenisation capabilities, and announcing Portugal's first bank-issued stablecoin for launch ahead of the July 2026 deadline.

Across Iberia, the firms that survive MiCA will not be the most innovative, but the most capitalised, and those two things have never been the same category.