Lagarde Blocked Binance’s EU License and Left It Locked Out

The Announcement That Never Shipped

By late May, Binance’s paperwork was effectively done, so much so that Greek officials had told Binance its application for a Europe-wide license was complete, a company press release headlined “Major Milestone” was ready to go, CEO Richard Teng was planning to fly to Athens for a photo shoot with the prime minister, and his local deputy was about to sign an office lease.

None of it happened and days later, a top official at the Greek regulator told Binance that European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde had personally intervened to thwart the application, according to people familiar with the interactions who spoke to the Journal.

Under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regime, authorization from a single member state passports across all 27, which is why the Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) mattered far beyond Greece. The ECB has no formal say in that process as licensing sits with national regulators. Greek authorities had already told the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in early June that they intended to approve the bid.

The reversal took about a week, with Binance withdrawing its application on June 24, before the HCMC issued any decision.

Two Reasons and a Digital Euro

The reported objections were not really about Greece. The first was apparently institutional turf, i.e., Lagarde preferred to wait for the possibility that ESMA would take over EU-wide crypto licensing rather than let one national regulator hand out a bloc-wide permit.

The second was monetary. A larger Binance footprint in Europe meant faster adoption of dollar-denominated stablecoins at exactly the moment the ECB is trying to build an alternative, with a digital euro pilot possible in 2027 and a first issuance penciled in for 2029. Binance’s 2023 guilty plea in the U.S. over money-laundering and sanctions violations gave the argument a clean hook.

Lagarde has never needed prompting on this subject, and her push for tighter supervisory control over the sector predates the Binance file. That said, neither the ECB nor Greek authorities have publicly confirmed that she intervened.

Where That Leaves Two Million Users

When the MiCA transition period closed on July 1, Binance had no license and its French entity halted spot, margin and futures trading, cutting off roughly 2 million users who were left withdrawing assets rather than trading them. Bitcoin.com News reported at the time that the exchange was suspending services across several EU markets, after a scramble for an alternative route that ran out of runway.

What replaced the license is a patchwork, given Binance leans on MiCA’s reverse solicitation carve-out, a narrow provision for customers who approach an unlicensed foreign firm entirely on their own initiative, and routes some EU trades through an Abu Dhabi entity that MiCA treats as a third country with no passporting rights.

ESMA’s position is that the exemption covers genuinely unsolicited contact, not a customer base built over years of marketing and app downloads. France’s ACPR has separately pushed the exchange on anti-money-laundering (AML) control gaps found during on-site checks, and one report found new EU accounts were still being opened without a license.

The exchange says it remains “committed to doing business in the EU on a long-term, compliant basis” and calls MiCA authorization an important step, with France’s AMF now the realistic path. Teng, who has warned that Europe risks its crypto lead if the MiCA rollout fragments, has said the company expects a license in the coming months. No application has been confirmed as filed.

Lastly, the stakes are not confined to Europe as Binance still clears more than 45% of global spot volume (as of late August), so the venue where much of bitcoin’s price discovery happens is one that 450 million Europeans cannot legally be marketed to. The EU has issued more than 230 MiCA licenses to competitors in the meantime.