What MiCA makes EU crypto exchanges publish, and who it binds

A regulated stock exchange in the EU has had to publish its quotes and trades, and to give them away after fifteen minutes, for years. The obvious question for anyone building on crypto data is whether MiCA did the same for crypto venues. It did, in one article, for a smaller set of venues than the word "exchange" suggests.

Why this market won't quote you a price set out what a published-data duty looks like under MiFIR and left the crypto regimes outside what it checked. This page is that check.

How it works

The duty sits in Article 76 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, the article headed "Operation of a trading platform for crypto-assets". Three paragraphs carry it.

• Pre-trade, paragraph 9. The operator "shall make public any bid and ask prices and the depth of trading interests at those prices which are advertised for crypto-assets through their trading platforms", continuously during trading hours.
• Post-trade, paragraph 10. It "shall make public the price, volume and time of the transactions executed", for all such transactions, "as close to real-time as is technically possible".
• Access, paragraph 11. That information is made available "on a reasonable commercial basis", with non-discriminatory access, and then: "That information shall be made available free of charge 15 minutes after publication in a machine-readable format and it shall remain published for at least two years."

Paragraph 16 asked ESMA for technical standards on how the data is presented, and the Commission adopted them as Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/417, published on 14 March 2025. That instrument is where the numbers are:

• Thirty seconds. Article 4: each transaction is published "as close to real-time as is technically possible and in any case within thirty seconds after the execution of the transaction".
• Five levels of book. Annex I, Table 1: a continuous order book publishes the aggregated number of orders and the quantity they represent "at each price level for at least the five best bid and offer price levels". A quote-driven system publishes each participant's best bid and offer with volumes; a periodic auction publishes the indicative price and volume.
• An automated market maker is covered too, differently. For a system "relying on liquidity pools and mathematical pricing and valuation models", Annex I requires the pricing equation, the liquidity in the pool on a continuous basis, and any parameter needed to work out the execution price of a given order. Recital 5 limits this to systems not "operated in a fully decentralised manner without intermediary", which recital 22 of MiCA puts outside the Regulation altogether.
• A fixed trade record. Annex II lists the fields: trading date and time, a crypto-asset identification code, the asset's full name, price, price currency, quantity, venue of execution and venue of publication as an ISO 10383 market identifier code, publication time and a transaction identification code, with flags for a cancelled or amended report. Currency pairs are written with the ISO currency code for fiat and the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier short name for the crypto-asset.
• Per-asset slices on request. Article 5 makes the venue publish pre- and post-trade data separately and, on request, broken down by crypto-asset — unless it makes the data available free of charge, in which case the disaggregation duty does not apply.

Who it binds

This is where most readings of MiCA go wrong. Article 76 does not bind "crypto exchanges". It binds "crypto-asset service providers operating a trading platform for crypto-assets", which is one of ten services a firm is authorised for, and MiCA defines it narrowly. Article 3(1) separates:

• operation of a trading platform — "the management of one or more multilateral systems, which bring together or facilitate the bringing together of multiple third-party purchasing and selling interests";
• exchange of crypto-assets for funds, and for other crypto-assets — "the conclusion of purchase or sale contracts … with clients … by using proprietary capital";
• execution of orders on behalf of clients.

A firm authorised only for the second and third is, on the face of its authorisation, dealing with you or routing your order, not running a multilateral book — and Article 76 does not reach it.

ESMA's interim register shows how that falls out. The CASPS.csv file ESMA published on 22 October 2026 has 387 entries for 384 distinct legal entities. Counted on 23 October 2026, 22 list "operation of a trading platform for crypto-assets" among their services. They include OKX Europe Limited, Bitstamp Europe S.A., Payward Global Solutions Limited (trading as Kraken), Bitvavo B.V., One Trading Exchange B.V., Gate Technology Limited and Revolut Digital Assets (Europe) Ltd, along with smaller venues and two German entities better known from securities and FX trading.

Several of the names readers expect are registered without it. Coinbase Luxembourg S.A., Bybit EU GmbH, KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH, Foris DAX MT Limited (Crypto.com) and Gemini Intergalactic EU Ltd each list custody, exchange for funds, exchange for other crypto-assets and transfer services, among others, but not operation of a trading platform. No entity whose name contains Binance appears in the file at all.

Three limits on that count. The register is interim: ESMA describes it as a set of CSV files "until mid-2026 when it will be formally integrated into ESMA's IT systems", republished weekly, and warns that information reported by national authorities "will not be immediately displayed". The duty attaches to the authorised entity and the platform it operates, not to a group's other venues elsewhere — the register names OKX Europe Limited, not OKX. And the transitional regime in Article 143(3), which let firms already operating before 30 December 2024 continue without a MiCA authorisation, ran until 1 July 2026 at the latest, so a venue absent from the file in October 2026 is not in that position any more.

Derivatives are outside the article entirely. Article 2(4)(a) says MiCA "does not apply to crypto-assets that qualify as" financial instruments. Whether a particular futures or perpetual product is one is decided under MiFID II, which this page did not examine; where it is, the order book it trades on is not a MiCA trading platform and Article 76 says nothing about it.

What it costs

MiCA sets two prices and leaves one of them open.

After fifteen minutes, nothing. The delayed data is free, machine readable and kept for at least two years. That is the only figure in the article.

Before fifteen minutes, a "reasonable commercial basis". The Regulation does not define that phrase for crypto, and Article 76(16) asked ESMA for standards on presentation and on order-book records, not on fees. Delegated Regulation 2025/417 says how the data is laid out and sliced; it says nothing about what a venue may charge for it. The regime for financial instruments now has a standard that makes a market data provider publish its fee schedule and the cost method behind it — the one described in why this market won't quote you a price — and nothing comparable was found here.

What the free data does not grant. Article 76(11) makes the delayed data available to the public. It does not say, in that article, what a recipient may then do with it, and a venue's own terms usually say a great deal — see what exchange API terms actually let you do. This page does not resolve how the two sit together; it notes that they are different documents.

What was not verified. Whether any of the 22 platforms serves a fifteen-minute-delayed feed and a two-year history today, at what address and in what format, was not checked for this page. The duty is in the Regulation; the delivery is something to confirm with each venue.

What you can do about it

Check the register before you rely on the duty. Open CASPS.csv, find the entity rather than the brand, and read the service column. Only "b. operation of a trading platform for crypto-assets" brings Article 76 with it. An exchange authorised to deal on its own account and to execute orders is a broker for this purpose, whatever its homepage calls it.

Ask an authorised platform for its Article 76(11) data by name. The request is short: where is the free fifteen-minute-delayed pre- and post-trade data published, in what machine-readable format, and where is the two-year history. A venue bound by the article has an answer; the shape of the answer is information either way.

Use the delayed data for what delay does not hurt. End-of-day marks, research, reconciliation, checking a vendor's candles against the venue's own record, building a backtest history from one authorised venue — none of that needs the last fifteen minutes. A screen or a bot does, and that is the part still sold.

Use the identifiers. Every Annex II trade report names the venue by its market identifier code and the asset by its Digital Token Identifier, which is the cross-venue key the ticker symbol never was. If you are reconciling the same coin across venues, see how to map a ticker to one coin.

Do not expect it from the venue you probably use. The largest global order books in this catalogue — Binance, Bybit and Coinbase Exchange — either have no MiCA entity in the register or have one authorised without the trading-platform service. OKX has an EU entity that holds it, which binds that entity's platform, not the global API. For those venues, the terms that govern their data are still the exchange's own.

Ask before you republish. Free to the public is not the same sentence as licensed for your product. If what you build would redistribute even the delayed data, put the question to the venue in writing and keep the reply.