Binance France Aims to Return Through an AMF Licence

Ten weeks after the July 1 shutdown, Binance France is preparing a fresh licence application with the Autorité des marchés financiers. The exchange is leaning on the PSAN registration it secured in 2022, a regulatory asset Greece could never offer it. French accounts have been running in degraded mode since the summer, and margin positions close on October 1. A licence granted in Paris would reopen all 27 member states at once.

Key Takeaways

• Binance is targeting the AMF for its MiCA licence, leaning on its 2022 PSAN registration
• French accounts degraded since July 1, margin and lending products close October 1
• Of 117 PSAN-registered firms in France, only 83 secured a MiCA licence in time

Ten Weeks of Degraded Service on French Accounts

Nothing has moved for Binance France since the summer. No new accounts, no euro deposits, spot trading suspended, staking and earn products switched off. Withdrawals are the only function still running, in crypto and in euros alike.

Ten weeks in, that regime affects a substantial client base. A French user cannot fund an account, cannot buy, and faces a simple choice: pull the balance out, or leave it sitting on a venue whose local future depends on an administrative decision nobody can date.

The regime follows directly from the European calendar. Since July 1, only firms holding CASP status may legally operate across the 27 member states, and Binance confirmed in late June that no group entity would be ready in time. The application filed in Greece through a local subsidiary was withdrawn on June 24, ahead of a refusal that looked certain.

The Athens detour had its own logic. The file went in during January through a local entity, aiming to collect the European passport from a jurisdiction less exposed than France. Pulling it voluntarily six days before the deadline closed that route and left the group without a door into the Union.

The national cull ran deeper than expected. The AMF set June 30 as the cut-off for the switch to a MiCA licence, and of the 117 firms holding a French PSAN registration, 83 cleared it. Thirty-four operators left the market or now run in reduced form, including the largest of them.

That number says something about the real cost of compliance. Building a licence file means minimum regulatory capital, formalised governance, an asset custody policy and auditable anti-money-laundering procedures. Smaller operators gave up before filing, unable to carry that fixed overhead.

One hard date is coming for account holders. Margin positions and lending products close on October 1, which forces a decision on anyone still exposed. An open position has to be settled before that date, with no option to roll it forward on the same venue.

The European Passport Now Runs Through Paris

The choice of France answers a plain administrative logic. Binance holds a PSAN registration there from 2022, which means a file the regulator already knows, procedures already audited and a local compliance record. Greece offered none of that, since the exchange was starting from a blank regulatory sheet.

What is at stake reaches well past the French market. MiCA works on a passport basis: a licence issued by one national authority opens access to all 27 countries with no further filing. Clearing the bar in Paris would hand the exchange the entire European market in a single step.

The same arithmetic runs the other way for licensed rivals. Every month without the largest global operator on the European market hands them commercial ground they would never have won otherwise, and a return would reshuffle euro pair market share immediately.

That is also what makes the review slow. An authority licensing an exchange of this size answers for it in front of 26 peers, and the European Central Bank was already drawn into the question of what happens to the group’s EU clients in the spring. This file does not move like a regional operator’s.

The legal context around Binance France adds its own drag. A money laundering investigation targeting Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao remains open in Paris. Nothing legally blocks a licence review running alongside it, but no regulator signs comfortably under an open case, and the two timelines are not coordinated.

Also on Cryptonomic:

• Hunter Biden Launches LAPTOP Memecoin, Founders Take 30%
• Liquid Network Recovers 3,400 of 4,000 Stolen Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Drops Under $79K Two Days Before US Inflation

The Exit Pushed Funds Into Self-Custody

The conclusion the exchange draws from its own withdrawal cuts against what lawmakers wanted. Richard Teng, Binance co-chief executive, put numbers on where the money went while speaking at the Reuters NEXT Asia summit in Singapore: 70% moved into self-custody, and only 30% into MiCA-licensed platforms.

The figure has been argued over all summer because it lands on the purpose of the text itself. A mass migration into personal wallets puts holdings outside the know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering plumbing supervision depends on. A user holding their own keys stops appearing in any reporting channel.

For the supervisor the outcome is a full reversal. The text was built to pull crypto activity into a controlled perimeter, with identified operators and reporting duties attached. On this specific population it produced the opposite, and no instrument currently exists to bring those holdings back under supervision.

Licensed rivals did not collect the windfall they expected. Kraken is among the venues that stayed compliant in Europe, as is Coinbase, yet the share of displaced funds reaching those platforms fell well short of pre-deadline projections. The dominant reflex among European users was to leave the system rather than switch providers inside it.

The argument obviously serves the firm making it, and it should be read that way: an excluded operator demonstrating that its exclusion cost the supervisor something. It is measurable all the same, and it will weigh on how the French file is read.

France has also shown recently that it will cut off access when it judges the framework insufficient. The French block on Polymarket was a reminder that local doctrine stays strict, established platforms included. Over the next three to six months, what the Binance France file really settles is whether the MiCA passport is a workable door for global operators or a barrier only European firms walk through.

Follow the story on Cryptonomic.