The transition window is shut
On July 1, 2026, France closed the transitional regime that had let crypto-asset firms registered under the 2019 PACTE law keep operating while they sought full authorization under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) confirmed that from that date, only entities holding a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) license under MiCA — or that have completed an Article 60 notification as an already-regulated financial entity — may lawfully serve French clients. The transition window ran a maximum of 18 months from MiCA's December 30, 2024 effective date, as the AMF's own PACTE-to-MiCA doctrine notice sets out.
The stakes for missing the deadline are not administrative. Under Articles L.54-10-4 and L.572-23 of the Code monétaire et financier, operating without authorization now carries up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine. Article L.54-10-4 itself, confirmed on Légifrance, bars both unlicensed operation and any advertising that implies authorization a firm doesn't hold. The AMF can also publish a blacklist of non-compliant providers, issue public warnings, and seek a French court order to block their websites.
The case for the hard line
The AMF's posture is not arbitrary severity. France ran one of Europe's more permissive crypto regimes for years — PACTE registration was comparatively light-touch, and that looseness is part of why Paris became a hub for exchanges that later drew scrutiny elsewhere. A harmonized, criminally-backed EU licensing floor closes the arbitrage that let thinly-capitalized or poorly-governed platforms shop for the softest regulator, a dynamic that contributed directly to episodes like the 2022 FTX collapse and its knock-on effects on European retail holders. ESMA's own end-of-transition notice is explicit that "not all current service providers will be authorized after 1 July 2026," and it is reasonable for a regulator to want that fact loudly signaled to retail investors before deadline day, not after a firm has already failed. Criminal penalties, in this framing, are the credible deterrent that makes a licensing regime more than a suggestion.
Where the line stops being proportionate
The problem is not that France is enforcing MiCA — every member state must. It's the mismatch between the AMF's own processing capacity and the cliff-edge date it is now enforcing with prison time. The regulator's own guidance concedes that authorization review "may take up to four months once the complete file has been submitted," and separately warns that "experience shows that original versions of the files submitted to the AMF are rarely complete" — meaning real timelines routinely run longer. As of January 2026, roughly 90 registered providers still lacked a MiCA license, with only 30% of them having filed an application at all. By the deadline, 83 of 117 PACTE-era PSANs had secured MiCA authorization, leaving 34 still unauthorized, a cohort that includes firms whose applications may simply still be sitting in the AMF's four-month-plus queue rather than firms that never intended to comply.
Collapsing "filed a complete application the regulator hasn't yet cleared" and "never sought a license" into the same criminal-exposure bucket punishes queue position as if it were bad faith. AMF president Marie-Anne Barbat-Layani's own framing of the pressure campaign — telling firms it's "becoming very, very urgent to finalise the licence applications," as reported by crypto.news — is itself an acknowledgment that applicant behavior, not just regulatory design, is the variable France is trying to move this late. A regulator that structurally cannot clear its own backlog in time shouldn't lean on criminal statute to paper over that capacity gap.
The passporting escape valve — and its costs
MiCA licenses passport across the EU, so a firm authorized in, say, Malta or Lithuania can serve French customers without ever going through the AMF. That undercuts the deterrence logic: sophisticated, well-capitalized platforms can route around France's queue, while smaller domestic firms without the resources to relicense elsewhere absorb the wind-down cost and reputational hit of the blacklist. Coinhouse's early full MiCA license is the model outcome the AMF wants; a scared exodus of smaller compliant-minded French startups to friendlier jurisdictions, while enforcement resources chase a shrinking pool of stragglers, is the more likely one if throughput doesn't improve.
What proportionate enforcement would look like
None of this argues against MiCA's licensing floor, which is a reasonable, evidence-based response to a sector that genuinely needed one after 2022's failures. It argues against treating an application backlog the regulator itself flags as chronic — and a hard date it set unilaterally — as equivalent to willful evasion. A grace mechanism for firms with complete, timely-filed applications still pending AMF review, distinct from the blacklist-and-prosecute track reserved for firms that never engaged, would preserve the deterrent without punishing applicants for the AMF's own four-month clock.