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Three stories broke this week that look unrelated but aren’t. Binance allegedly moved $1.7 billion to Iran-linked wallets. Crypto.com just got a US banking charter. And MiCA’s July 1 deadline is about to kick unlicensed platforms out of Europe for good. If you’re trading from the EU, this is the week you start paying attention to regulation — whether you want to or not.
Binance and Iran: This One’s Bad
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal dropped parallel investigations on Monday showing that Binance’s own compliance team found roughly $1.7 billion flowing from two exchange accounts to entities tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Houthis throughout 2024 and 2025. Over 1,500 accounts were accessed from Iran using VPNs. One channel went through Blessed Trust, a Hong Kong fiat partner handling about $1.2 billion. Another entity, Hexa Whale Trading, pushed around $500 million in USDT on Tron to what law enforcement described as a shadow banking corridor linked to sanctioned oil trade.
Here’s where it gets messy: at least four investigators who flagged the transactions were reportedly fired or suspended. Binance says nobody was let go for raising compliance concerns and claims it reported everything to authorities. CZ — pardoned by Trump in October after his four-month stint for the 2023 guilty plea — called it old news from disgruntled ex-employees. But the compliance brain drain is hard to ignore. The chief compliance officer has reportedly discussed leaving, and multiple sanctions leads are already gone.
For EU users, this isn’t just a US enforcement story. Binance filed for MiCA authorisation in Greece in January and still doesn’t hold a full licence. If sanctions scrutiny follows across jurisdictions, the passporting rights that MiCA is supposed to guarantee become a very live question.
MiCA: 126 Days Left
July 1, 2026. That’s the hard stop. After that date, every crypto-asset service provider in the EU either holds a MiCA licence or stops operating. No extensions, no more transitional grace periods. If your favourite exchange hasn’t sorted this out, that’s your cue to move funds somewhere that has.
Where things stand: 53 MiCA licences granted across 30 EEA countries in the first six months. Germany and the Netherlands lead the pack. Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Robinhood are in. Binance is not — yet. Spain and Italy report 75% compliance among local firms. Greece, Portugal, and Ireland are lagging at 50–60%. Retail participation is up 27% since MiCA kicked in, institutional exposure up over 30%. The regulation is clearly doing what it was supposed to: bringing in money that was sitting on the sidelines waiting for clarity.
But the FOMO-inducing part? USDT is still not MiCA-compliant. Tether hasn’t secured an EU electronic money institution licence, so exchanges have been forced to delist it. That fragments liquidity in a real way — the world’s most traded stablecoin simply isn’t available for spot trading in Europe anymore. If you’re still holding USDT in an EU wallet, you can custody and withdraw it, but you can’t trade it. USDC and euro-backed EURI are the compliant alternatives.
Meanwhile in the US: Banking Charters Go Brrrr
While Europe grinds through compliance timelines, Washington is handing out federal banking charters to crypto firms like it’s a bull run. Crypto.com got conditional OCC approval on February 23 for Foris Dax National Trust Bank — a limited-purpose entity for custody, staking, and trade settlement under federal oversight. No deposits, no loans, but full OCC supervision. It joins Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, and Bridge, all of which locked in national trust bank status recently. Even Trump’s World Liberty Financial filed an OCC application in January.
The bigger picture is harder to ignore. The GENIUS Act (July 2025) created a federal stablecoin framework. The SEC dropped nearly all Biden-era enforcement actions that didn’t involve fraud. The CFTC now lets futures exchanges list spot crypto. And CME announced crypto futures and options will trade 24/7 starting May 29 — with volume already up 46% year-on-year. That last one should worry European derivatives exchanges. If Eurex and Euronext don’t match those hours, institutional flow moves to Chicago.
So What Does This Mean for You?
If you’re trading from Europe, the next four months are a filter. Platforms that secured MiCA licences get to stay. Platforms that didn’t — including potentially the biggest exchange in the world — get cut off. The Binance Iran story is a stress test for the entire passporting model: what happens when one member state’s regulator has compliance questions about a firm that’s supposed to operate seamlessly across 27 countries?
The US is building a parallel system that’s arguably more attractive to institutional capital right now. Federal custody under the OCC, 24/7 derivatives on CME, and a stablecoin framework that actually works — that’s not regulation-as-obstacle, that’s regulation-as-infrastructure. Europe had the head start with MiCA. Whether it keeps that lead depends on whether the framework delivers real liquidity and real access — not just a licence that looks good on paper.
July 1 is coming. Plan accordingly.
