The National Bank of Hungary handed Budapest-based CoinCash the country's first MiCA authorisation the same week, letting a market the previous government had almost emptied begin to reopen.
The Hungarian parliament voted 143 to 46 on Tuesday to repeal the mandatory third-party validation regime that had governed every crypto conversion in the country since July 2025. A single abstention completed the tally. The finance minister said the previous framework had disrupted the domestic market and driven service providers out of Hungary. The regime was less than 13 months old.
Under the rule, no crypto-to-fiat or crypto-to-crypto trade could complete without a certified local validator first examining wallet ownership, verifying the customer's identity, and issuing a compliance declaration confirming the source of funds. Transactions completed without that certificate were legally void. The 2024 Crypto Assets Act that created the regime also attached prison time: up to two years for unregistered trades between HUF 5 million and 50 million, up to five years above that, and up to eight years for transactions above HUF 500 million. Operators of unlicensed exchange services faced three to eight years, depending on volume.
Revolut suspended crypto services in Hungary within weeks of the rules taking effect. Other firms began weighing relocation to Estonia or Lithuania. According to Forbes reporting from the initial rollout, roughly 500,000 Hungarians were active in crypto when the legislation was introduced; trading activity collapsed after it took hold. Budapest-based CoinCash, one of the country's larger domestic exchanges, went dark on its own initiative in December 2025 while preparing for MiCA authorisation.
The repeal is the second major climb-down since Péter Magyar's pro-European Tisza Party ended Viktor Orbán's 16-year run at April's parliamentary election. In June, government spokeswoman Anita Kobol confirmed the criminal penalties tied to unregistered crypto trading would also be removed, and Innovation and Technology Minister Zoltán Tanács publicly called the earlier framework excessive and politically driven. The European Union had already opened a compliance investigation into whether Hungary's rules were consistent with MiCA before Tuesday's vote made the question moot.
The National Bank of Hungary granted Tiwala Solutions, CoinCash's operator, the country's first MiCA authorisation on July 20. Co-founder Gábor Galántai confirmed the licence on LinkedIn last Friday. It covers custody, crypto-to-fiat exchanges, crypto-to-crypto trading, transfers, investment advice and portfolio management — the full MiCA remit rather than a narrow permission. The firm said it would restore services in stages and expand into MiCA-regulated products beyond spot trading.
Hungary is the last major EU jurisdiction to fall in line with MiCA's basic design. Not every incumbent has enjoyed the transition; Binance withdrew its Greek MiCA application in June rather than see it through. The prior Hungarian regime had built a parallel compliance layer that no other member state had attempted, requiring a licensed intermediary to sign off on individual transactions before they settled. Removing it does not soften the country's crypto rules. Every service provider still needs MiCA authorisation and remains subject to the bloc's anti-money-laundering, market-abuse and consumer-protection obligations. What is gone is the transaction-by-transaction bottleneck that made the country uneconomic to serve.
For CoinCash and any Hungarian firm still standing after a year of the old rules, the sequence is now legible: the licence exists, the domestic gatekeeper regime is gone, and the enabling law that carried the criminal penalties is next on the parliamentary calendar. Roughly 500,000 users are still there. Whether Revolut and the other exchanges that pulled out come back to compete for them will depend on how quickly other providers follow CoinCash through the National Bank's MiCA process.
