MiCA enters into force: what the crypto regulation means for investigators

With the first MiCA provisions entering into force on 30 June 2024, a new chapter begins for the European crypto landscape. The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation — MiCA for short — is the first comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto-assets in a major economic region, and it changes the rules for exchanges, wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, and investigators alike.

The timeline at a glance

• 30 June 2024 — Stablecoin rules (Titles III and IV) apply
• 30 December 2024 — Full entry into force of all MiCA provisions
• Transition periods — Existing CASPs (Crypto-Asset Service Providers) have until 2026 in many member states to obtain a licence

What changes for investigators?

The most important change for our work is the Travel Rule in combination with the EU Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR). CASPs must exchange sender and receiver information for transfers between crypto providers starting from the very first euro — similar to classical SWIFT banking.

For institutional investigations this means:

• Better information requests: CASPs have to document who is behind a deposit — even for small amounts.
• Risk scoring becomes mandatory: Exchanges must check the counterparty address for incoming transactions. Self-custodied wallets carry additional documentation requirements.
• Sanctions lists are actively cross-checked: Addresses on OFAC or EU sanction lists must not be served.

What MiCA does not regulate

MiCA does not cover fully decentralised protocols — DeFi, DEXs without an identifiable operator, and peer-to-peer transactions without a CASP remain outside its scope. For forensic investigations, this means that exactly these areas stay the primary domain of on-chain analysis tools.

A regulated CASP gives us names for addresses. Coinator gives us the trails leading to them.

Our take

MiCA brings much more documentation, more standardisation, and — in the medium term — more cooperation between European CASPs and investigative authorities. At the same time, the "cat-and-mouse game" shifts further to the unregulated fringes: cross-chain swaps, CoinJoin services, DEX aggregators. These fringes are exactly where transparent, well-documented forensic tools like Coinator create their value.

For more on how Coinator detects CoinJoin transactions and cross-chain swaps, see our methodology overview.