Key Takeaways
- OKX obtained its MiCA license in January 2025.
- The exchange is working with Standard Chartered to offer products and solutions to EU institutions.
- European banks, hedge funds, family offices, and insurance firms are increasingly looking to crypto.
Europe’s crypto scene has struggled to “take off” in comparison to the U.S., but things could be looking different as the continent’s bloc’s regulations take effect.
CCN spoke with the CEO of OKX Europe, Erald Ghoos, at this year’s European Blockchain Conference in Barcelona, who shared great optimism for the future of crypto in the EU.
OKX in Europe
In January 2025, OKX became the first global exchange to secure a license to operate under the EU’s newly established Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulations.
And the process was a little easier than some had thought.
Arguments have been made that MiCA’s requirements are a little too strict and quite costly, especially for smaller firms.
It’s already causing certain firms to close down or leave the EU in search of a better deal.
For OKX, having already been established in Malta, which had taken a proactive approach to regulating crypto, Ghoos explains that OKX didn’t need to approach its MiCA application from scratch.
With many of the necessary compliance, security, and governance structures in place, plus a board comprised of risk, audit, and other committees, the process “was relatively straightforward.”
In fact, he states that MiCA in terms of capital requirements, custody, board, and governance oversight, was a “lighter setup” than Malta’s crypto regulations.
Expansion and Exposure
Demand for institutional solutions has skyrocketed in 2025 as fresh U.S. and European regulations have opened the door for major players to enter the crypto space.
OKX recently announced it would be partnering with Standard Chartered (SC) to offer institutional custody solutions that don’t require direct deposits, with SC securing assets.
“In the partnership, we mirror that balance in real time to our platform so that the assets or the collateral is safeguarded at Standard Chartered but the users, the institutional users, can trade it on our platform,” Ghoos explains.
Crypto has gone through several difficult periods, all of which have informed or inspired progress in one direction or another.
Following the collapse of FTX, which ultimately saw several companies liquidated, historical arrests, the entire crypto market was squashed for a few years.
The industry needed to get smarter and safer to survive.
“After FTX, I think the whole industry was reeling. Institutional users, the risk teams at institutional companies, were a little bit more hesitant. Now, I think with this product or this partnership, it mitigates a lot of those risks or these concerns that they were having before,” Ghoos added.
The OKX EU boss highlights that there’s no real way of predicting black swan events, “if there was anything we could foresee, we would work on something,” he adds.
However, like 2008, like FTX, there are certain events that only a few will be aware of, and even fewer that can prevent it from happening. But, lessons have been learned.
Now, OKX and many other firms have stronger risk teams, Ghoos adds, and in many ways, thanks to MiCA and other factors, these improvements are being stress tested.
Importantly, Ghoos highlights that OKX and others are acquiring talent from the likes of Goldman Sachs, SC, and other major banks.
This, to ensure crypto can run and operate as smoothly, if not better, than traditional finance.
European Appetite
Despite all these major steps forward, Europe’s institutions haven’t quite adopted crypto in the way their U.S. counterparts have.
But this may have nothing to do with markets or regulations being better or worse in the EU.
In Ghoos’ view, it’s more of a cultural thing, “where the U.S. might be a little more advanced in risk-taking.”
European investors have taken a more conservative approach, which Ghoos admits may have come as a result of past and current regulations, but there’s certainly a large appetite on the continent.
“There’s quite a bit of interest from funds, large family officers,” and for the first time, insurance firms, which Ghoos explains is a particularly interesting development.
There’s a cultural shift happening.
Ghoos highlights that Luxembourg’s sovereign wealth funds recently allocated 1% of their portfolio to Bitcoin, with other banks and entities also making a push to do the same.
Web3 Appeal
What most people care about, however, is how tall these advances will benefit them.
Solid regulatory oversight certainly appeals to the incredibly wealthy institutions of the world, but what about retail users?
Well, according to Ghoos, more money from institutional players means more liquidity on their order books and, therefore, better pricing for OKX users.
Looking beyond trading, banks are also receiving increasing demand from their retail users who want to access Bitcoin and crypto.
“What we’re now also working on is integrating with banks, some larger banks in Europe, so that they can use our liquidity pool. We build an API for them. They do the KYC on the users.”
He adds,
Because they’re a bank, we can reuse their KYC, and those clients can, through our API, in a white label solution, buy their crypto on our platform through their banking portal.”
This, he notes, could see some amazing benefits for decentralized finance (DeFi), which has advanced quite a lot in the past couple of years in terms of user experience, interface, and security.
Now, they’re able to create intuitive, frictionless products such as the OKX wallet and its DeFi product, amongst other innovations, which act as a middle ground for users not yet 100% trusting in self-custody and Web3 platforms.
In the wake of these advancements, adoption is rising.
Ghoos compares cryptos current level of adoption to the early internet; it wasn’t until around 5% of the global population was using it that it really started to flourish. Crypto, he says, is nearing that breakout point.
With more institutional interest than ever, regulatory clarity from the U.S. and Europe, DeFi being more accessible, “the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall together, for real mass adoption,” he remarks.
