Ripple, the leading blockchain technology company building digital infrastructure for cross-border payments, has secured a full Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) license from the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier in Luxembourg.

 

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The full CASP authorization, announced on Monday, comes shortly after Ripple received preliminary approval from Luxembourg's financial regulator in June. With this license, Ripple is now fully compliant with the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation, enabling it to offer its crypto services to businesses and institutions across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area.

 

"This CASP authorization means Ripple enters the post-transitional MiCA era fully compliant and ready to scale," said Cassie Craddock, Managing Director for the United Kingdom and Europe at Ripple.

 

"The institutions we work with across Europe are looking to build their digital asset services alongside regulated partners, and Ripple is licensed and ready to meet that demand."

 

Ripple now joins a small group of digital asset firms, including Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, Bitstamp, and OKX, that have obtained full authorization under MiCA. The company says it now holds more than 75 regulatory licenses worldwide, in addition to the Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license it secured in February.

 

Elsewhere on the regulatory front, the MiCA July 1 deadline is now fully in effect, with unlicensed digital asset firms required to stop serving clients in the European Union. It is estimated that more than 80 percent of the approximately 1,200 previously registered firms that lacked full licenses by late June have either exited the European Union or restricted their operations there.

 

Ripple's full CASP license comes shortly after the company was named among more than 140 members of the Open Standard consortium, a group of companies collaborating on the launch of OpenUSD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged stablecoin. The company also recently invested in Flutterwave, Africa's largest fintech unicorn.

 

 

Zodia Custody, a company that provides institutional custody for cryptocurrencies and digital assets, has secured a payment license from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), the country’s primary financial regulator.

 

 

With this payment license secured, Zodia Custody is set to expand beyond crypto custody, its main offering, and is now moving into both the custody and seamless transfer of electronic money tokens and stablecoins within the European Union.

 

“Institutional adoption of crypto assets demands infrastructure that meets the highest standards of regulatory adherence and operational efficiency,” said Ami Nagata, Managing Director, Luxembourg at Zodia Custody Europe.

 

“Securing a Payment Institution license alongside our MiCA CASP authorization is a critical step in bridging our capabilities across crypto asset safekeeping. With both licenses in place, our clients have the certainty they need to manage their electronic money token and crypto asset strategies across Europe, with full confidence that their assets are safeguarded within a bank-grade environment.”

 

Alongside the payment license and the MiCA license it secured in December last year, Zodia Custody is now well-positioned to serve as a core infrastructure provider for institutional digital finance. Securing these licenses removes structural barriers and counterparty risks commonly associated with crypto asset service providers.

 

The securing of the Luxembourg payment license comes shortly after Standard Chartered made a non-binding offer to acquire Zodia Custody. Although the acquisition cost was not publicly disclosed, the offer has already been accepted by Zodia Custody shareholders.

 

Zodia Custody currently serves a number of institutional clients, including 21Shares, Re7 Capital, Bitwise, and BitMEX. In April of this year, Zodia Custody partnered with BitMEX to integrate the Interchange platform into BitMEX's infrastructure to enable off-exchange trading, a move that enhances the safety of clients' assets on the BitMEX platform, especially in the event of a security breach.