The European crypto regulation MiCA has applied across the EU without transitional relief since July 1, 2026. Coverage since then has centred on the exchanges that left the European market. For staking the picture is murkier, and there is a simple reason for it: the regulation does not recognise the term as a service in its own right.
Anyone delegating coins through a provider still has a clear question to answer. Does that provider need a licence, and what happens to the balances it holds if it does not?
Staking under MiCA: why the regulation does not treat this service as a category of its own
Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 works from an exhaustive list of crypto-asset services. Recital 21 groups them into two sets. The first covers the operation of a trading platform, the exchange of crypto-assets for funds or for other crypto-assets, the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients, and transfer services. The second covers placement, the reception, transmission and execution of orders, advice and portfolio management.
Staking does not appear anywhere in that list. It would be wrong, though, to conclude from this that staking is unregulated. The licensing requirement attaches to what the provider actually does, not to the label on the product. Almost every staking offering aimed at retail investors involves at least one of the listed activities.
What matters is who controls the coins
Deposit your coins with a platform and press its staking button, and you hand over the private keys. That is precisely the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients from the first set. Whether the provider then delegates the balance to a validator, places it in a pool or settles it internally makes no difference to the licensing requirement. Providers that disclose their rewards and their registered office appear in our comparison of staking platforms.
Custody and administration of crypto-assets: the licensing trigger that captures custodial staking
Custodial staking means that a third party holds the keys. This covers centralised exchanges, broker apps and most providers that advertise rewards as an annual percentage. Such firms are fully subject to authorisation as crypto-asset service providers, or CASPs.
Authorisation brings obligations that rarely surface in day-to-day use but make the difference when something goes wrong: the segregation of client holdings from proprietary ones, requirements on organisation and complaints handling, disclosure duties. In Germany the Crypto Markets Supervision Act, the KMAG, implements the regulation and provides in Section 45 that a crypto-asset held in custody for a client is deemed to belong to that client. In the insolvency of the institution, that is the basis for separating it from the estate.
The carve-out in Section 45 KMAG hits staking clients in particular
The protection is not unlimited. The statute expressly excludes the case where the client has consented to the asset held in custody being disposed of for the account of the institution or of third parties. Agree to the terms of a provider that passes the coins on or deploys them for its own account, and you may forfeit the very attribution that counts in an insolvency.
Editorial assessment: for staking clients this is the most consequential line in the act, and it does not appear in the marketing material. Where the terms of use grant the provider the use of the coins for its own account or for third parties, the balance stands on a different legal footing from plain custody.
Non-custodial staking and solo staking: the cases where MiCA does not apply at all
Keep the keys yourself and delegate straight from your wallet to a validator, and no intermediary sits between you and the network. Recital 22 of the regulation records that crypto-asset services provided in a fully decentralised manner without any intermediary fall outside its scope.
That cuts both ways for you. The upside is that there is no provider that can fail and take your coins with it. The price is that there is no supervision either, and no claim against anyone if a validator is misconfigured and triggers slashing. Wallet interfaces change nothing as long as the keys stay with you. As soon as a service takes in coins and pools them, the case falls back under the licensing requirement.
Compare staking platforms that disclose their rewards and their registered officeTransitional period over: in Germany, grandfathering under Section 50 KMAG expired on December 31, 2025
A misunderstanding has proved stubborn here. Article 143(3) of the regulation allowed providers that had supplied their services before December 30, 2024 under applicable national law to carry on until July 1, 2026, or until their application for authorisation had been decided. The same paragraph expressly permits member states to disapply that transitional regime or to shorten its duration.
Germany shortened it. Section 50(2) no. 3 of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act provides that the authorisation deemed to continue lapses at the end of December 31, 2025 at the latest. Anyone seeking to rely on the old law therefore had six months less than the European framework allowed. July 1, 2026 was never the operative cut-off for incumbent German providers.
In practice this means that a provider offering you staking today, holding your coins and invoking an old German registration, has had a problem since the beginning of 2026. Either an authorisation is in place or a valid legal basis is missing.
Checking CASP authorisation: where to look up your staking provider's licence status
The evidence takes a few minutes to gather. Authorised providers are notified by the national supervisor and listed in the European registers; BaFin also maintains a company database of its own. Two points matter more than they first appear to.
