Ben Zhou told CoinDesk that MiCA covers only spot trading, which doesn't generate enough revenue to sustain an exchange. Derivatives, tokenised assets, and stablecoin services require MiFID II and Electronic Money Institution licences that most crypto firms haven't even started pursuing.
Ben Zhou, the chief executive of Bybit, has offered one of the bluntest assessments yet of what it actually costs to do business in the European Union's new crypto regime: a Markets in Crypto-Assets licence, on its own, is not enough to turn a profit.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Zhou explained that MiCA, the EU's landmark regulatory framework that took full effect last year, covers only the basics: fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-crypto spot trading. The problem, he said, is that spot trading alone doesn't generate enough revenue to sustain a large exchange operation. The products that actually make money (derivatives, tokenised assets, structured products) sit under entirely separate regulatory umbrellas, requiring a MiFID II licence for financial instruments and an Electronic Money Institution licence for payment services and stablecoin issuance.
It is an observation that should concern any mid-sized exchange that spent the last two years racing to secure MiCA approval as though it were a golden ticket. Bybit secured its own MiCA licence from Austria's Finanzmarktaufsicht last year, established its European headquarters in Vienna, and committed to hiring more than 100 staff locally. Zhou described the choice of Austria's FMA — a regulator with a reputation for thoroughness — as deliberate. "If we have any issues, we just send an email and go to FMA in Vienna," he said, framing proximity to a demanding regulator as a strategic advantage rather than an overhead.
But proximity and compliance come at a price. Zhou estimated that Bybit would need roughly two years to reach profitability in Europe, and acknowledged it could take longer. The exchange doesn't make money under its current MiCA-only licence, he said; as a large platform with deep pockets, Bybit can afford to treat the European operation as a long-term investment while it pursues additional authorisations. Smaller competitors cannot.
That is the real story here. MiCA was designed to create a single, harmonised framework for crypto across the 29 countries of the European Economic Area. It succeeded: no exchange needs to apply separately in each member state anymore. But harmonisation and sufficiency are different things. An exchange that obtains MiCA and stops there can legally operate, but it can only offer a narrow product set that barely justifies the compliance cost. The EU's evolving approach to digital asset regulation, which now extends to tokenised settlement infrastructure via the European Commission's DLT pilot, assumes that crypto firms will integrate into the continent's existing financial plumbing, not merely sit alongside it.
Zhou's candour is unusual for an exchange CEO. Most industry executives have spent the past eighteen months publicly celebrating MiCA as proof that Europe is "open for crypto business." The private calculation has always been more cautious; Zhou is simply saying it out loud. A MiFID licence, which governs trading in financial instruments across the EU, is a substantially heavier lift than MiCA — it demands higher capital reserves, more granular reporting, and compliance with best-execution obligations designed for traditional securities markets. An EMI licence, meanwhile, is the gateway to issuing or custodying e-money, which in practice means handling stablecoins at scale. Both are expensive. Both take time. And both are necessary to compete with incumbent brokerages that already hold them.
The implications extend beyond Bybit. Japan's recent reclassification of crypto as a financial instrument, bringing insider trading bans and securities-grade oversight to 13 million accounts, shows that major jurisdictions are converging on the same conclusion: crypto trading cannot be regulated in isolation from the broader financial system. The EU got there first with MiCA, but the framework is increasingly looking like a floor, not a ceiling. Exchanges that want to build a viable European business need MiCA, MiFID, and an EMI licence, at minimum. That is three separate regulatory processes, three sets of capital requirements, and three ongoing compliance obligations.
Britain's FCA crackdown on illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading earlier this week is a reminder of what happens on the other side of the Channel, where the regulatory picture is even less settled. Zhou, for his part, seems content to play the long game in Vienna. Bybit's European operation is a bet that the licensing moat will eventually reward the exchanges that invested early and broadly, not just the ones that cleared the first hurdle.
Zhou said Bybit currently serves clients across nearly all 29 EEA countries under its Austrian MiCA licence.
