Is MEXC MiCA-Licensed? No. And EU Users Are Still In

Ten weeks after the MiCA transitional period ended, MEXC still accepts registrations from every EU member state. On 13 September 2026 the two registers ESMA publishes said the rest: MEXC is on the one for non-compliant entities and absent from the one for authorised providers, and the only EU company in its name is being wound up. This page is about what each of those facts means for an EU user, and what none of them mean.

One thing before the registers. This site earns a commission when someone opens a MEXC account through its link, so the honest version of this page is worth more to it than a flattering one: a reader who finds out later that the licence question was left out is a reader who will not trust the fee tables either. Everything below links to the register, the regulation or the company filing it was read from, with the date it was read.

Two registers, and which one MEXC is on

"MiCA licensed" is not a claim an exchange makes about itself. A national authority grants an authorisation under Article 59 of the regulation, and ESMA lists the result in an interim register that anyone can download as a CSV. There are two files. One lists authorised crypto-asset service providers; the other lists entities that a national authority has found to be providing services without authorisation.

The authorised file I downloaded is dated 9 September 2026 and contains 346[src] entries. I searched it for "MEXC" and "MX Global" and found nothing. The non-compliant file contains 167[src] entries, almost all of them entered by Italy's CONSOB, and one of the few that names a global exchange is this row, entered by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets:

"MEXC Global provides crypto-asset services in the Netherlands without the required MiCAR license. MEXC is in breach of section 59 MiCAR." — decision date 16 September 2025

The AFM's public warning that accompanies the entry adds two things the register row does not. First, that MEXC "actively targets Dutch consumers", citing a Dutch-language X account and the sponsorship of a Dutch blockchain conference. Second, and this is the sentence I keep coming back to:

"It is unclear from which country and from which legal entity MEXC offers its services. As a result, it is not possible to determine, for example, whether MEXC handles the assets of consumers with diligence and what position the consumer would have if MEXC were to run into financial problems."

That is a regulator saying it could not work out who it was regulating. It is the reason the "headquartered in Seychelles" line that most reviews carry is not on this site's safety page either: the Seychelles regulator has stated the company operating mexc.com was never licensed there.

What 1 July 2026 changed, and why for MEXC it was never the point

Most articles about "MEXC and MiCA" are organised around a deadline. The deadline is real, but it applied to a narrower group than those articles suggest, and I do not think MEXC was in that group. The regulation's own words, Article 143(3):

"Crypto-asset service providers that provided their services in accordance with applicable law before 30 December 2024, may continue to do so until 1 July 2026 or until they are granted or refused an authorisation pursuant to Article 63, whichever is sooner."

Read the condition. The transitional period, sometimes called grandfathering, was for providers that were already operating legally under a national regime. It let them keep going while they applied. Member states could shorten it, and several did: the Netherlands ended it on 30 June 2025, Germany on 31 December 2025, which is why the AFM and BaFin warnings about MEXC arrived when they did rather than in July 2026. The outer limit for everyone was 1 July 2026[src].

A provider that was not operating under a national registration on 30 December 2024 never had a transitional period to lose. For it, MiCA's authorisation requirement applied from day one, and 1 July 2026 was just another day. The AFM warning says the authority could not identify MEXC's legal entity at all, and the only EU company I could find in MEXC's name tells its own story, which is the next section. My reading is that MEXC was outside the regime before the deadline and is outside it after, and that the deadline framing mostly serves sites that need a news hook.

The only EU company in MEXC's name is being wound up

Before MiCA, several EU states handed out national crypto licences readily, and many global exchanges collected one through a small local company. MEXC's was in Estonia: MEXC Estonia OÜ, registry code 14832615, registered in October 2019, earlier named MXC Estonia OÜ. In November 2023 the outlet FinTelegram reported that the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit had revoked its licence and that the company appealed; dozens of exchange reviews still repeat that report. By 13 September 2026 those articles had been taken offline, and the FIU decision itself could not be found, so the revocation is not treated here as established. What is public is the company card in the Estonian e-Business Register, read on 13 September 2026.

Status: In liquidation. A liquidator was appointed on 22 June 2026[src], nine days before the MiCA transitional period closed. The company filed pre-liquidation accounts on 20 August 2026 covering a final financial year from 1 July 2025 to 22 June 2026. Revenue for that year: 8,000 €[src]. The 2023 reporting period had shown 344,000 €. The registered share capital is 412,352 €, held by a single individual.

Two things follow. A company with eight thousand euros of annual revenue was not the entity running a global exchange, so even when its licence was live, that licence said little about where user funds sat. And a company being liquidated is not a company applying for a MiCA authorisation. Whether MEXC has some other EU vehicle is not knowable from public registers. What the registers show is that the one on the record is closing.

What MEXC's own terms say about Europe today

I loaded the MEXC User Agreement on 13 September 2026 and read the section headed Prohibited Jurisdiction. It lists, as places where MEXC "does not provide Services, nor do we accept registration of Users": North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, the Russian-controlled regions of Ukraine, Canada, and any territory under comprehensive EU, OFAC or FATF-blacklist sanctions.

No EU member state is on that list. The United Kingdom is. Canada is. The Netherlands and Germany, whose regulators have said in writing that MEXC has no authorisation to serve their residents, are not. The terms then add that the list is "non-exclusive and is subject to change, at any time and from time to time, by MEXC in its absolute sole discretion", and that a user who becomes resident in a prohibited jurisdiction must tell MEXC "at the earliest possible opportunity".

So the position, stated plainly: the exchange will let you in from the EU, the regulators say the exchange should not, and the exchange can change its mind about letting you in whenever it likes. Availability and authorisation are different questions with different answers, and the sites that answer "is MEXC available in Europe" with a simple yes are answering the less important one. There is a separate page for what each regulator has published.

What MEXC has said, and what the record shows five months later

In April 2026 MEXC appointed a new chief executive, Vugar Usi, previously chief operating officer at Bitget. Cointelegraph quoted him saying that "the MiCA license application is a top strategic priority for the company" and that MEXC was making "proactive preparations to establish a fully compliant business entity within the EU".

I take statements like that as statements of intent, and intent is checkable against registers. Five months on, on 13 September 2026: no MEXC entity in the ESMA authorised file; no application I could find confirmed by any national authority; and the one EU company in the name in liquidation. I also read the CEO's LinkedIn activity the same day. The recent posts are about tokenised securities in South Korea and AI policy between the United States and China; a conference programme for October describes him as responsible for "the exchange's EU authorisation track". A track is not a licence. That is the whole of what is public, and I would rather show you the gap between the April sentence and the September registers than fill it with a guess in either direction.

What an authorisation would give you, concretely

It is easy to treat "licensed" as a badge. It is more useful to know what the badge obliges the exchange to do, because that is exactly what you do not get from an exchange without one. A MiCA-authorised provider must:

• hold client crypto-assets and funds separately from its own, so that in an insolvency they are identifiable as yours (Article 70);
• run a complaints procedure with a published route to the national authority when it fails (Article 71);
• meet prudential requirements, meaning a minimum of capital or insurance sized to what it does (Article 67);
• be a legal entity with a registered office in the EU that a regulator can name, inspect and, if necessary, take to court (Article 59).

Set those against the AFM sentence quoted above. The authority could not determine whether client assets are handled with diligence or what your position would be in an insolvency, because it could not determine which company it was looking at. That is what the absence of an authorisation costs: not a badge, but the segregation, the complaints route and the named defendant. The place you feel it is a risk-control freeze, where the only appeal goes back to the exchange. MEXC does publish a monthly proof of reserves, which is better practice than many unlicensed venues, and it is not a substitute for any of the four items above. Reserves show assets. They do not show who would get them.

Is it illegal for you, the customer?

I am not a lawyer, and this is the one place on this page where I will say so twice. What I can read in the regulation is that Article 59 places the obligation on the person providing the service, and that neither the AFM nor BaFin publication contains any sanction aimed at the retail customer. The warnings are addressed to you as a warning, not as a threat. Tax treatment of what you earn on MEXC, and your ability to enforce anything against a company nobody can locate, are separate questions from legality, and they are the ones that bite.

Will the account be cut off?

Several sites claim that MEXC told EU users to withdraw their funds before 1 July 2026. I searched MEXC's own announcements and support pages for that notice and did not find it. What I did find is that MEXC's own news section carried a string of syndicated articles about the deadline and what EU users should do, which is a strange thing for an unlicensed exchange to run and tells you nothing about its own plans. Until someone shows me the announcement, I treat the withdrawal notice as unconfirmed.

What the terms allow is clearer than what MEXC has done: the prohibited list can change at any time, and the agreement provides for terminating an account and liquidating open positions if a user is found to be in a prohibited jurisdiction. Binance, which had a MiCA application and withdrew it, stopped serving EU clients on 1 July 2026; the Binance comparison covers that. MEXC has so far kept the door open. If you are in the EU, the prudent reading is that access can end with whatever notice MEXC chooses to give, that open futures positions would be closed at a price you do not choose, and that there is no authority to whom you could complain about the manner of it.

The exchanges that are on the register

From the same authorised file, three of the exchanges people usually weigh against MEXC, with the date of their authorisation as the register records it: OKX Europe Limited, Malta, 27 January 2025[src]; Bybit EU GmbH, Austria, 28 May 2025[src]; KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH, Austria, 27 November 2025[src]. Bitget, which several comparison sites describe as licensed, is not in the file. I earn nothing if you open an account at any of these, and the Bybit comparison already says the authorisation gap does not favour my link. It does not. It is still the fact.

One caution in the other direction: an entry in the register tells you which legal entity is authorised, and it is usually a European subsidiary. Bybit EU GmbH is authorised; Bybit's global entity is not the same company. If you open an account at a licensed exchange, make sure it is with the EU entity, or the protections listed above are not yours either.

My read

MEXC is not MiCA-licensed, has no confirmed application, and the one EU company in its name is being liquidated. It continues to accept and serve EU users because its terms do not exclude them, and two EU regulators have said that is unlawful on MEXC's part. None of that is hidden. All of it is in registers you can open yourself, and I have linked every one.

This site still carries a referral code for MEXC. The only way to square that with the paragraph above is to state the position without softening it and to say what a sensible EU user does with it: keep on MEXC only what you would accept losing, withdraw rather than accumulate, and do not rely on any complaints route existing. If you want the protections MiCA provides, the register above lists who offers them, and this page will not try to talk you out of choosing one of them.

Questions people ask

Everything above was read from primary sources on 13 September 2026: ESMA's CASPS.csv and NCASP.csv, the AFM public warning, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on EUR-Lex, the MEXC User Agreement, the Estonian e-Business Register card for MEXC Estonia OÜ, and public LinkedIn posts. Registers update; if a MEXC entity appears in the authorised file, this page is wrong from that day and I will change it.