What a crypto licence actually costs
Start with the one figure people search for: capital. Under MiCA, minimum own funds are fixed by service class in Annex IV — €50,000 for reception, execution and advice; €125,000 for exchange or operating a trading platform; €150,000 for custody — and you must hold the higher of that floor or a quarter of your previous year’s fixed overheads. Offshore is different again: the BVI publishes flat application fees of US$10,000 for custody or an exchange and US$5,000 for other services, while Kazakhstan’s AIFC asks for roughly US$200,000 for a trading facility and the UAE’s VARA sets capital by activity, from about AED 100,000 up to AED 1.5 million.
So there is no single price, but there are hard anchors. The mistake is stopping there, because in almost every regime the capital number is the floor, not the bill.
The capital figure is the smallest part
The expensive parts are the ones no headline quotes. On top of capital you pay for the AML programme and a real money-laundering reporting officer, the DORA and ICT-resilience systems EU regulators now test, local substance — an office and resident staff a supervisor can inspect — and the legal drafting behind a file that gets approved rather than sent back. The UAE stacks on more: VARA requires net liquid assets of at least 1.2 times monthly operating expenses, reconciled daily, plus professional-indemnity and crime insurance.
Then there is time, which is a cost even when no one invoices it. Singapore’s MAS review commonly runs nine to eighteen months; Malta’s MFSA around six to nine; Slovakia’s NBS three to five for a clean file. Every extra month is pre-revenue staffing. Two applicants filing for the same service in the same country routinely land far apart, because one arrives with audited policies and a compliance hire and the other builds from zero.
Cost by route: EU, offshore and the premium hubs
Match the number to what it buys. An EU MiCA CASP licence carries the €50k–€150k capital floor and a serious build-out, but it passports across all 27 member states from one authorisation — you pay for reach. A cost-led EU route (Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria) keeps operating costs down without lowering that capital floor. Offshore registrations look cheapest on paper — BVI at US$5,000–10,000 in fees, Seychelles now a genuine but criminally-enforced regime — yet banking access is the real constraint, and a “licence” in SVG or Panama is often just incorporation. The premium hubs sit at the top: the UAE and Singapore cost the most in capital, substance and time, and buy the most credibility. Cheaper to obtain is not the same as cheaper to run, or more useful.
How to get a real quote
Ask for a written quote tied to your exact service mix, target jurisdiction and current compliance maturity — anything quoted before those questions is a marketing number. Bring three things: the specific CASP services you will offer, the countries your users actually live in, and what you already have (entity, policies, MLRO, tech stack). A credible advisor breaks the figure into application fees, capital, build-out and recurring costs, and says where the range moves. Treat a single confident all-in number, offered with no questions, as the red flag it is.