Twenty-three companies hold a stablecoin licence, and twenty-one of them are European

The sharpest number in this cut is a zero. MiCA's asset-referenced-token licence, the ART, was written for stablecoins backed by a basket of currencies, commodities or crypto, the category regulators worried about most after Libra. Two years into MiCA enforcement, no company holds one. The market took the other door. Every dedicated stablecoin licence in the European Union is an e-money-token licence, the EMT, and an EMT references a single fiat currency at par by definition. The licensed market did not merely stay small. It stayed single-currency.

As of 3 August 2026, 23 companies hold a dedicated stablecoin licence worldwide: 21 hold the MiCA e-money-token licence in the European Union, and 2 hold the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's stablecoin-issuer licence. Zero hold the MiCA asset-referenced-token licence. A separate cut, 26 companies classified stablecoin or token issuers by business, overlaps this set in 21 names but is not the same list. In the United States, the GENIUS Act's rule for federal nonbank stablecoin issuers is a proposed 12 CFR Part 15, published on 2 March 2026, with no final rule as of 3 August 2026. Six of the 31 firms in the US charter pipeline are stablecoin or token issuers, and two of them, Circle and Paxos, are already chartered as national trust banks without a federal stablecoin authorization to hold.

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How many companies actually hold a stablecoin licence?

Twenty-three. That is the count that survives a strict definition: a company a financial regulator has specifically authorized to issue a stablecoin. Twenty-one hold the MiCA e-money-token licence, granted by national competent authorities across the European Union and recorded on the ESMA register. Two hold the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's stablecoin-issuer licence: Anchorpoint Financial and The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, both dated 10 April 2026. No other regime in the map carries a dedicated stablecoin authorization with a live holder.

That is a smaller number than most stablecoin coverage implies, and the reason is definitional. The Global Crypto Licence Map tracks 476 licensed companies across 10 regimes. The general MiCA crypto-asset service provider licence, the CASP, has 310 company holders. A CASP lets a firm custody, exchange or transfer crypto. It does not let a firm issue a stablecoin. Only the EMT and the ART carry that permission in Europe, and only 21 firms cleared the EMT.

A second denominator sits beside the first, and conflating them is the common mistake. 26 companies on the map are classified stablecoin or token issuers by what they do. That set and the 23 licence-holders share 21 names, not all of them. Two of the 23 licence-holders carry a different classification: CACEIS Bank (infrastructure and custody) in the European Union and HSBC (a bank) in Hong Kong. Five classified issuers hold no dedicated stablecoin licence at all. Bridge, the Stripe-owned stablecoin platform, is one of them, holding a general MiCA CASP registration rather than an EMT. GMO Trust is another, issuing under a New York trust charter, which authorizes a trust business, not a stablecoin specifically. Being in the business of issuing a token and holding the licence written to authorize a regulated stablecoin are two different facts, and the registers keep them apart.

Why zero asset-referenced-token licences is the real signal

MiCA built the ART category for the hardest case. An asset-referenced token stabilizes against a basket: several currencies, a commodity, or a pool of assets. It carries the heaviest reserve, governance and disclosure obligations in the regulation, and an ART issuer large enough to be classed significant would fall under direct European Banking Authority supervision. The rule was drafted in the shadow of Libra, the basket stablecoin Facebook proposed in 2019 that put the concern on every central banker's desk. Two years into enforcement, the licence written for that concern has zero holders.

The market answered the design question by not showing up. Issuers chose the e-money-token route, which pegs one token to one currency at par and slots into the existing e-money framework. Twenty-one EMT holders against zero ART holders is not a gap in coverage. It is the licensed market naming the product it wants to ship: a single-currency digital euro or digital dollar under e-money rules, not a synthetic basket under bank-grade supervision. Every headline about multi-currency or basket-backed stablecoins is describing a regulated product that, in the EU, no company currently holds the licence to issue.

That carries a commercial consequence for anyone selling reserve management, attestation or custody into this market. The licensed demand is single-currency e-money, and the reserve, audit and reporting stack an EMT issuer buys is not the stack an ART issuer would. The zero is a product-roadmap fact before it is a regulatory one.

The market is European, and it is young

Twenty-one of the 23 dedicated stablecoin licences sit in the European Union. That is 91% of the licensed market inside one regime, and it is recent. MiCA's stablecoin provisions began to apply on 30 June 2024, and the earliest EMT records in the map sit within days of that date, the first of them held by Paxos's European issuance entity. Circle and Société Générale-FORGE follow on 1 July 2024. The most recent, CACEIS Bank, took effect on 30 June 2026. Twenty-one licences accrued across roughly 24 months, and the roster mixes crypto-native issuers with names from the core of European finance: Société Générale, Banking Circle, Oddo BHF and CACEIS all hold one.

Hong Kong is the only other jurisdiction with a live holder, and it has two. The United States has none, because it has no final rule to grant one. Every other regime in the 10-regime map licenses crypto activity broadly, the UK, Singapore, Dubai, Japan, Switzerland, Abu Dhabi and New York among them, but none carries a dedicated stablecoin-issuer authorization with a holder in the data. Read the licensed stablecoin market as a map and it is a European map with a Hong Kong footnote.

None of this moved in the week to 3 August 2026. No new EMT, ART or HKMA licence took effect. The week's additions to the broader map were general CASP registrations, one UK registration, and a coverage re-curation of Swiss bank records, none of them stablecoin-licensing events. On the dedicated-stablecoin count, a flat week is the honest headline, and the count that did not change is 21, 2 and 0.

What about the United States?

The United States has a stablecoin law and no stablecoin licence to issue under it. The GENIUS Act was enacted on 18 July 2025. It directs several federal regulators to write the rules under it, and the OCC's slice, covering federally qualified nonbank stablecoin issuers, is drafted as a new 12 CFR Part 15. The proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on 2 March 2026. The comment period has closed. As of 3 August 2026 there is no final rule, the statutory one-year deadline of 18 July 2026 passed unmet, and the Act's provisions now take effect on the earlier of 18 January 2027 or 120 days after final rules, which puts 18 January 2027 on the calendar as the governing date.

So the firms positioning to issue federally regulated dollars cannot yet register to do it. What they can do, and are doing, is charter a bank. Six of the 31 firms in the US charter pipeline are stablecoin or token issuers, and the composition is the interesting part. It is not six firms waiting on GENIUS. Two of them, Circle and Paxos, are already chartered. The OCC records Circle's First National Digital Currency Bank with an open status dated 10 July 2026, and Paxos completed its conversion to a national trust company in December 2025. Sony and Bridge hold conditional approvals. World Liberty Financial and Agora are pending.

That is the thesis in one sentence: the stablecoin issuers in the US are building the bank wrapper before the issuance rules are set. A national trust charter grants custody powers, fiduciary standing and a federal supervisor. It does not make the holder a GENIUS-qualified stablecoin issuer, because that category has no final rule to admit anyone into. Circle holds a national trust bank and no federal stablecoin authorization at the same time, today. The bank came first because the bank was available first.

What do institutions already own?

The equity market did not wait for any of it. Circle went public, and its stock is now one of the most widely held crypto-linked equities in institutional portfolios. In 13F filings for the quarter ending 31 March 2026, CRCL is held by 319 of the 1,000 largest disclosing managers, at $10.64B in disclosed value. That is close to the entire disclosed stablecoin-issuer equity book, which the tracker sizes at $10.70B across 534 holders once the smaller filers are counted. One ticker carries almost the whole category.

Set CRCL against the rest of the crypto-equity tape and the point sharpens. It is the fourth-largest single crypto-related holding among the 1,000 largest of the 3,088 disclosing managers, behind Strategy at $23.96B, Coinbase at $23.55B and the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETP at $11.62B, and ahead of every miner. The largest stablecoin issuer in the world by circulation is not a private company institutions are waiting to access. It is a public stock 319 of the biggest managers already own. This is a Q1 2026 snapshot, and the Q2 filings are due on 14 August 2026, so the figures are a position as of 31 March, not a claim about this week.

The counting, stated plainly

Four numbers in this piece are easy to blur, so here they are held apart. 23 is the count of companies holding a dedicated stablecoin licence. 26 is the count of companies classified as stablecoin or token issuers by business. 6 is the count of stablecoin or token issuers in the US charter pipeline, of which 2 are open. 0 is the count of MiCA asset-referenced-token licences, and, separately, the count of final US federal stablecoin rules. Each has its own denominator and none is a substitute for another.

This piece counts 23 companies holding a licence written specifically to authorize stablecoin issuance: 21 MiCA e-money-token, 2 HKMA, 0 MiCA asset-referenced. Meridial's Stablecoin Register, on the same hub, counts more because it counts differently: 29 issuers under any comprehensive regime, which adds the US OCC national-trust and NYDFS-trust holders plus Japan, the UAE, Bahrain and Nebraska, and it counts live tokens rather than companies, so one EMT issuer running several tokens is several records (38 EMT records against 21 EMT companies). Same registers, two questions: who holds the dedicated stablecoin licence, and who issues under any comprehensive regime.

What this changes

Stablecoins get discussed as a global institutional inevitability. The licence registers describe something narrower and more specific: a 23-company market, 21 of it European, entirely single-currency, with the basket category the rules anticipated sitting empty, and the US federal regime still a proposed rule five months after publication. The licensed map is a different market from the inevitability story, and the difference is the commercial point.

For the firms that sell into stablecoin issuers, reserve custody, attestation and audit, transaction monitoring and compliance tooling, the map reads as a named target list rather than a theme. 23 licensed issuers exist today, each traceable to a regime and an effective date. Four more are taking shape in the US charter pipeline: Sony, Bridge, World Liberty Financial and Agora, the stablecoin issuers holding conditional or pending charters but not yet open. For an issuer choosing where to domicile, the same registers answer a live question before capital is committed: the EMT route has 21 precedents and the ART route has none, which tells you which product the supervisors have actually been licensing.

Edition of 4 August 2026. This week's cut read one category, the licensed stablecoin market, across the three live Meridial trackers: the Global Crypto Licence Map (476 licensed companies across 10 regimes), the US Crypto Banking Map (31 firms in the OCC charter pipeline), and the Institutional Holdings Tracker (3,088 managers, $115B disclosed for the quarter ending 31 March 2026). Every licence count here is the count as of the 3 August 2026 snapshot, and the registers move.

Common questions

Sources

• European Securities and Markets Authority, MiCA interim register of authorized entities (e-money tokens, asset-referenced tokens, and crypto-asset service providers). Retrieved for the snapshot of 3 August 2026.
• Hong Kong Monetary Authority stablecoin-issuer register, with the Hong Kong SFC virtual-asset lists. Retrieved for the snapshot of 3 August 2026.
• Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Corporate Applications Search (apps.occ.gov/CAS) and the digital-assets licensing applications page. Retrieved 3 August 2026.
• Federal Register, "Implementing the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act," document 2026-04089, 2 March 2026.
• Circle, "Circle Receives Final OCC Approval to Establish National Trust Bank," 10 July 2026.
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR Form 13F filings for the quarter ending 31 March 2026 (CRCL and the stablecoin-issuer equity class).
• Licence classifications, company typing, and cross-register counts are Meridial's, from the Intelligence Hub data packs dated 3 August 2026 (licence map and charters) and 31 March 2026 (institutional holdings).