Licence to mint: the geography of MiCAR passporting and emerging specialisations evidence from ESMA’s interim register

Purpose Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) harmonises market access for crypto-asset services and token disclosures across the European Economic Area, but a single rulebook need not produce spatially even activity. Using European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) interim MiCA register, this paper aims to map the early geography of regulatory entry and intended cross-border gateway formation under the EU MiCAR. It also develops a reusable integration index and a revealed-comparative-advantage taxonomy of emerging MiCAR roles. Design/methodology/approach From the December 2025 snapshot – 132 authorised crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), 29 electronic-money-token white-paper entries and 625 other-crypto-asset filings – the authors build a jurisdiction-level data set and construct measures of concentration, passport-footprint “hubness” and functional integration and revealed comparative advantage. The analysis is deliberately descriptive. Findings Activity clusters in a limited set of home jurisdictions, with different MiCAR functions peaking in different places; intended cross-border reach is sharply bimodal; and functional sorting reflects the differing requirements of the disclosure layers. Exploratory cross-sectional regressions associate hubness with CASP scale and outward orientation, and pre-existing fund-industry depth more with functional integration than with gateway reach. Research limitations/implications The register records stated intent rather than realised activity; the findings are indicative associations, and the licensing-ecosystem mechanism is offered as an interpretation for future testing. Practical implications For supervisory practice, this paper’s main implication is that a harmonised rulebook does not remove the need to monitor where cross-border gateway capacity and disclosure activity concentrate. The distinction between gateway reach and functional integration matters because these roles place different demands on the regulatory ecosystem. A jurisdiction with many outward-facing CASPs may require supervisory capacity geared towards cross-border service provision, operational resilience, custody, trading and conduct-of-business risks. A jurisdiction in which CASP activity co-locates with electronic money token and other-token filings may require a broader infrastructure of legal, prudential, disclosure, payments and fintech expertise. Supervisory coordination and resource allocation across the EEA should therefore distinguish between jurisdictions that host many licences, jurisdictions whose authorised CASPs intend broad EEA reach and jurisdictions in which services and token-filing functions co-locate. Originality/value To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first paper to use ESMA’s interim MiCA register to produce systematic, cross-jurisdiction evidence on the geo-economics of MiCAR passporting. The analysis goes beyond licence counts by introducing a passport-footprint (“hubness”) measure, an integration index and a revealed-comparative-advantage decomposition that together map jurisdictions into a transparent four-group taxonomy of emerging MiCAR roles. The results open a research agenda on how regulatory passports shape the spatial organisation of financial intermediation, and provide a replicable framework that can be updated as ESMA’s register evolves.