"Crypto licence" is one phrase covering several entirely different regulatory regimes: the European Union's MiCA authorisation in Cyprus, Czechia, Lithuania or Estonia; non-EU options such as Dubai (VARA) and Armenia (CBA); and regimes that are restricted or suspended outright, like Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. This hub compares them honestly: we only include regimes verified against the regulators' own pages, laws and official fee instruments, and we set out separately the Georgian statutory layer that applies no matter which jurisdiction you choose for the group.
Our discipline matters on this market, because most comparison content does not follow it: where no amount is published in an official source, we print no number and write "confirm with the regulator". Where fees or capital requirements are officially fixed — the Cyprus fee directive rows, the Estonian fee, the Dubai AED schedule, Armenia's AMD capital ladder — the exact figures appear below. Numbers circulating in intermediary marketing that cannot be traced to an official source are deliberately absent.
The EU Frame: MiCA and the Route for a Georgian-Owned Group
In the European Union, authorisation of a crypto-asset service provider (CASP) is governed by Regulation MiCA ((EU) 2023/1114), and one of its rules is decisive for foreign owners: under Article 59(2) a CASP must have its registered office in a Member State where it carries out at least part of its services, its place of effective management in the Union, and at least one director resident in the Union. In practice this means a Georgian-owned group enters the European market through an EU-incorporated, EU-managed company — a Georgian company cannot obtain a MiCA authorisation directly.
Third-country firms may serve EU clients only at the client's own exclusive initiative (Article 61(1), reverse solicitation); soliciting or promoting in the Union already requires authorisation. The statutory clock is uniform across the Union: a completeness check within 25 working days, a decision within 40 working days of a complete application, and a possible suspension of up to 20 further working days for missing documents (Article 63). Own funds follow Article 67: the higher of the permanent minimum capital of the provider's class in Annex IV or one quarter of the preceding year's fixed overheads — confirm the exact class amount for your service stack in Annex IV or with the regulator. The grandfathering window of Article 143(3) closed on 1 July 2026 — Lithuania closed it even earlier, on 31 December 2025 — so every new entrant now files a full Article 62 application.