Italy Is Pushing Crypto Firms Toward Reality

I was reading through Italy’s latest reminder to the crypto industry and, honestly, it gave me the same feeling you get when a landlord sends that polite but firm message saying the lease is almost up. Nothing dramatic, nothing loud, but you can hear the clock ticking in the background. And Italy really wants crypto firms to hear it too, because with MiCA coming fully into force, the country is making sure nobody can say they weren’t warned.

Consob, Italy’s market watchdog, basically told everyone to pay close attention to the December 30 deadline. Not this year, but the one in 2025. It sounds far away when you say it out loud, but in regulatory time, that’s like tomorrow morning. Right now, the virtual asset service providers operating in Italy only need to be registered with the OAM, which honestly has been a pretty light-touch system. But under MiCA, that era is ending. If these firms want to stick around after December 30, 2025, they have to actually apply for a full license, either in Italy or in another EU country.

And, if they do apply, they can keep operating while they wait for the verdict. But that grace period doesn’t last forever. The absolute cutoff is June 30, 2026. After that, the lights go off whether your authorization is approved or not. Consob didn’t dress it up. If a firm has no intention of applying at all, it needs to pack up by December 30, stop serving customers, and give people their money back. Pretty straightforward.

What really stood out to me is how different life will look for CASPs compared to the current VASP model. Registering with the OAM is almost like signing your name on a clipboard at the front door. Becoming a CASP under MiCA, though, is an entirely different thing. It means ongoing supervision, formal authorization, and actual regulatory expectations. It’s clear that Europe wants to bring crypto services closer to the rest of the financial system, and Italy is basically echoing Brussels word-for-word on this.

Consob even made a point of saying that their announcement lines up with ESMA’s own reminder from the same day. There’s something oddly coordinated about it, almost like the regulators want to make sure the message spreads through the EU without any distortion. I guess when you’re trying to reshape an entire industry’s operating framework, you don’t want mixed signals floating around.

While all this was happening, Italy’s Committee for Macroprudential Policies got together in Rome. I kind of imagine these meetings being pretty dry, but the takeaway was actually more interesting than usual. They said the economy looks fine overall, but crypto related risks might be growing, mostly because of the increasing number of links between crypto markets and the traditional financial system. And they’re not wrong. Even if crypto feels like its own universe sometimes, it keeps brushing up against everything else.

They also mentioned how uneven global regulation is making things trickier. The EU is moving quickly with MiCA, but other parts of the world are still figuring things out. It creates this weird asymmetry where some investors are heavily protected and others are wandering around with almost no guardrails. And because money moves everywhere instantly now, that kind of imbalance eventually becomes everyone’s problem.

Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance has already started digging deeper into how retail investors are exposed to crypto, both directly and indirectly. That part didn’t surprise me. Whenever regulators start issuing reminders and deadlines, they usually also start looking more closely at whether the average person is being pushed into something they don’t fully understand.

So the whole situation feels like a gentle push turning into a firm shove. Crypto companies can’t just sit in that fuzzy in-between space anymore. They either evolve into fully regulated service providers or they leave the Italian market entirely. No drama, no shouting, just a slow tightening of the rules until the transition is complete.

And honestly, whether you love crypto or barely tolerate it, there’s something kind of inevitable about this moment. The industry wanted legitimacy. Well, this is what legitimacy looks like.