It's been a busy week in the fintech space — from Binance halting key crypto services in Europe, to President Donald Trump disclosing he made more than $1 billion from crypto in 2025. To unpack all of this and more, I'm joined by Anastasia Kinsky, Fintech TV correspondent and editor of The Signal newsletter. Anastasia, welcome to the show — this is your first time with us and I can't wait to hear your take. Europe has seen major regulatory developments this week, with the MiCA transitional period ending and the UK's FCA finalizing its crypto rulebook. What do these changes mean for crypto firms operating across Europe?
Thank you so much for having me. In a way, it means everything and nothing — because many of these developments were ones we all knew were coming. Starting with the EU: the MiCA transitional period came to an end this week, and as many expected, an estimated 80% of firms were unable to continue offering services to customers across the EU because they hadn't secured a license and had to shut down. That has left us in a period of presumed consolidation, where the larger firms that did get their licenses will start absorbing those customers — so there's a meaningful market shift underway.
Alongside that, conversations have begun around MiCA 2.0 — what it could look like and what gaps it needs to fill, such as tokenized wholesale markets and cross-border stablecoin activity. There's also discussion around whether supervisory authority should sit with ESMA rather than individual countries, since fragmented national licensing has been a major source of delays.
On the UK side, the FCA's policy statements were well-timed. This is legislation that has existed since 2023, but the industry was waiting for the regulator's rulebook to have clarity on what the rules actually look like for crypto activity. The statements were largely in line with expectations, with one notable change — stablecoin capital requirements were reduced from 2% to 1% following significant industry pushback. There's also been welcome clarity on the timeline for achieving authorization. I think that's where the UK can differentiate itself, having learned lessons from how slow and difficult the authorization process has been elsewhere. There seems to be a real emphasis here on engagement, clarity, and giving firms enough runway to get into compliance.
That's very important context for people to understand right now. Also this week — OpenUSD launched with the backing of 140 founding partners, which triggered a sharp selloff in Circle's stock. How significant is this new entrant, and does it pose a genuine threat to USDC's dominance?
It certainly dominated the headlines this week and was a key feature of our newsletter. The launch is clearly designed with one particular advantage in mind — it has a huge list of established institutional partners as part of its consortium. We're talking Visa, large banks, household names. That institutional backing is significant. But when it comes to how significant it really is long term, there are a couple of things to consider. Circle is also working closely with institutions, and the business model for OpenUSD relies on distributing interest earned on backing assets to the partners in the consortium.
A lot of people have pointed out that consortium stablecoins have existed before — Paxos being one example from a couple of years ago — and they have failed to gain the real traction that Circle and Tether have. The market seems to gravitate strongly toward those two. At the end of the day, it comes down to usability and trust. The proof will be in the pudding — if OpenUSD can genuinely build that trust and capture the market, then perhaps. But for now, I think people will continue to use USDC as the dominant stablecoin.
On another headline this week — BNY Mellon has integrated USDC minting and burning into its custody platform for institutional clients. What does this tell us about the growing role of traditional financial institutions in the stablecoin ecosystem?
It tells us that optionality is the number one goal. BNY Mellon is actually part of the OpenUSD consortium I was just talking about — so just because they're backing that consortium doesn't mean they're not also interested in offering services for USDC. What it shows is that institutional legitimacy matters, but so does responding to what customers actually want. This is part of an ongoing and growing trend of financial institutions offering these services — we saw similar announcements from Standard Chartered this week as well. Customers are looking for the programmable capability that tokenized finance offers, which relies on having a payment and settlement option that is native to a blockchain ecosystem. Whether that ends up being a consortium stablecoin, a single-issuer stablecoin, or something that eventually looks more like a tokenized deposit — that's all still to be worked out. But the demand is clearly growing.
Anastasia Kinsky, thank you so much for breaking down what's behind the headlines this week. Thank you for being here with us.
Thank you for having me. And if anyone is interested in receiving these headlines on a daily basis, The Signal is Fintech TV's daily newsletter — it cuts through the noise on all of this.
