Two months after MiCA, Binance aims to return to France via the AMF

Since July 1, 2026, Binance can no longer offer services on crypto-assets in France due to lack of MiCA approval. Two months after this change, the Financial Markets Authority has neither blocked access to the platform nor prevented the opening of new accounts from France. The funds withdrawn by French clients left, but rarely to the approved competitors that were expected. And the exchange, far from having turned the European page, is already preparing its return, through France this time.

What has changed, and what has not changed

Back to the facts. On June 24, Binance announced by email to its French clients that no entity in the group would obtain CASP approval before the end of the transitional period, a deadline that the AMF officially recalled in the spring. The file submitted in January in Greece, via a local subsidiary, had just been withdrawn rather than receiving an expected refusal. Since July 1, French accounts have been operating in degraded mode: no more account openings or deposits in euros, stoppage of spot trading, staking and savings products, but withdrawals maintained in crypto as well as in euros.

On paper, the output is “orderly”as required by the AMF, which recalled that practicing without authorization exposes you to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine. In fact, Tremplin.io documented on August 20 that tests carried out the day before by the Sandmark firm had made it possible to open, verify and fund a Binance account from five EU countries, including France, without the slightest warning about the absence of a license. Two accounts even passed full KYC. When questioned, the platform limited itself to ensuring that the availability of its services in Europe remained “aligned with applicable legal and regulatory frameworks”.

Approved competitors did not recover the stake

The scenario written before the summer seemed clear: Coinbase, Kraken, Coinhouse, Bitpanda or Bitvavo would share the abandoned accounts. Coinhouse even launched a transfer bonus of up to €1,000 between June 25 and July 10.

The reality is rougher. THE July 9, during the Reuters NEXT Asia summit in SingaporeRichard Teng delivered a breakdown that made regulators cringe: 70% of the funds withdrawn by Europeans went to self-hosted wallets, compared to 30% to MiCA approved platforms. He draws a straightforward conclusion: these funds now escape any KYC and anti-money laundering controls, which calls into question the real effectiveness of the system.

The figures come from Binance and deserve to be read as such, the company has an interest in highlighting the limitations of MiCA. They are not isolated, however: the market did record a capital flight at the time of maturity, with $1.23 billion in weekly net outflows at the beginning of July (+207% over one week), and a negative monthly balance of $2.35 billion in June according to CoinMarketCap, the highest net outflow in the sector that month. At the group level, this European hemorrhage, however, remains marginal: Binance retained nearly 40% market share in June on the total volume of exchanges monitored.

A return via France? The real match starts now

The platform excluded from the French market could, however, return to it via the same route it lost in Greece: that of a national regulator. As of the end of June, several media outlets reported that Binance was targeting a new MiCA filing with the AMF, relying on its former PSAN status obtained in 2022, an asset that Greece, where the company was starting from regulatory zero, could not offer. Changpeng Zhao, the founder, for his part attributed the Greek failure to “political forces” which he never identified, evoking a rivalry between two candidate countries before an external blockage intervened, a version which he himself presents as unconfirmed.

For Paris, the equation remains delicate. The AMF spent eighteen months explaining that MiCA would serve as a filter and that France would not be the weak link in the Union, a speech difficult to reconcile with the granting of approval to the actor that Greece did not want to validate, while a judicial investigation for money laundering remains open in Paris against Binance and its founder. Refusing, conversely, amounts to leaving two million accounts in a gray zone for the long term and, if we follow Binance’s reasoning, to pushing part of the funds out of control.

October 1 will close the last compartment still active for French clients, that of margin and loans. Until then, the AMF will have to rule on the new file expected from Binance, a decision which will arbitrate, in one direction or the other, the access of the two million French accounts still suspended, part of which also remains exposed to the legal proceedings in progress against the exchange.