YouHodler, the crypto lending brand founded in Switzerland, now holds a MiCA licence in Italy. Consob, after consulting the Bank of Italy, authorised YouHodler Italy S.r.l. as a crypto-asset service provider by resolution no. 24156 of 8 October 2026, the company said in a release datelined Rome, 9 October. The licence reached the European level on Friday 16 October, when the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its weekly update of the interim MiCA register, a file Coindaro downloaded and checked on 19 October.
The YouHodler MiCA entry raises two questions the announcement leaves open. ESMA’s file already names the other 26 EU member states, France and Spain among them, as countries where the Rome-based company may provide services. The company says it serves clients in Italy and “plans to extend its services to all 27 EU Member States”, without giving a date. And the five services Consob authorised do not include lending, borrowing or yield accounts, the products the YouHodler brand is best known for.
Consob’s YouHodler MiCA licence: resolution 24156, filed in December 2025
YouHodler Italy applied to Consob on 29 December 2025, according to Finanza Digitale, which reported the authorisation on 13 October. That puts the review at a little over nine months. The decision covers the Italian company only. The ESMA file gives its address as Via del Commercio 32 in Rome and its website as youhodler.eu, a separate domain from the brand’s main site, youhodler.com.
The press release went out on Business Wire on 13 October, and the company blog carried it on 14 October. Lorenzo Barbantini Scanni, Chief Business Officer of YouHodler Italy, said the authorisation “is the result of long and rigorous work with the authorities”. Ilya Volkov, the group’s co-founder, said the licence gives anyone dealing in crypto in Italy, “and in time across the rest of the Union,” a supervised provider. The law firm Lener & Partners advised the company through the authorisation process, according to the release.
Before MiCA, YouHodler Italy worked under Italy’s national regime as a virtual asset service provider on the register of the OAM (Organismo Agenti e Mediatori), effective from 29 July 2022 according to a company announcement published by FinTech Futures. Under MiCA, firms that wanted to keep serving Italians needed a Consob authorisation once Italy’s transitional period ended in June 2026.
What the licence covers, and what it does not name
MiCA lists ten crypto-asset services. Consob authorised five of them for YouHodler Italy, and the ESMA register row shows the same five, with their codes:
- custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients (service a);
- exchange of crypto-assets for funds, such as euros (service c);
- exchange of crypto-assets for other crypto-assets (service d);
- execution of orders for crypto-assets on behalf of clients (service e);
- transfer services for crypto-assets on behalf of clients (service j).
The licence does not include operating a trading platform, placing crypto-assets, receiving and transmitting orders, giving advice or managing portfolios. Those are the other five MiCA services, and YouHodler did not obtain them in Italy.
It also does not name lending, borrowing, interest or yield products, the ones the brand is best known for: Cointelegraph described YouHodler on 19 October as “a crypto lending platform offering yield products”. Lending is not one of the ten services MiCA lists.
On 19 October, the menus of youhodler.com listed, among other products, a “Growth account” introduced with the line “Earn more on your crypto”, Get Cash, presented as a way to “get cash without selling your crypto”, the MultiHODL feature and a Cloud Miner offer. The site footer names several group companies: YouHodler SA, shown as a registered financial intermediary in Switzerland and as a VASP registered with the Banco de España; YouHodler Italy S.R.L.; and a YouHodler SA branch in Argentina registered with the CNV.
It is not known whether those products are provided by YouHodler Italy or by another company of the group. Neither the site nor the release says so, and Coindaro found no source that does. The release does not say how the products relate to the Consob licence either. What the documents show is narrower: the five services above are the whole scope Consob granted and ESMA recorded.
For the services that are covered, the company lists the protections MiCA brings: segregation of client crypto-assets, governance and security requirements, pre-contractual information and a complaints procedure. The release says nothing about a possible move of accounts held with other YouHodler entities, such as the Swiss company YouHodler SA, to the Italian one, or about changes to their terms.
26 passport countries in ESMA’s register, one market in the company’s words
The ESMA file has a column listing, for each provider, the member states where it is recorded as providing its services. For YouHodler Italy it lists 27 codes: Italy as home state and every other EU country, from Austria to Slovakia. Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, the three non-EU members of the European Economic Area, are not on it. Among Italy’s ten licensed providers, only one other firm, Hercle, has such a full list; six name Italy alone.
On the company’s side, the wording is cautious. The release says YouHodler Italy “serves clients in Italy” and plans its expansion “through the procedure set out in the Regulation”. It gives no timetable and does not say whether that procedure has started.
The two can be reconciled, but only partly. A register entry is not a launch. The country column tells readers which markets have been declared for the firm; it does not show that the website accepts customers there today, nor that the cross-border notification has run its course. ESMA has not commented on the row, and the company has not said whether it has filed its passport notification. Until one of them does, Italy is the only market YouHodler confirms in its own words.
How a MiCA passport works under Article 65
Passporting lets one MiCA licence work in every member state. Under Article 65 of MiCA, a provider that wants to serve other member states sends its home authority a list of those states, the services it will offer there, the planned start date and any other activities outside MiCA. The home authority, Consob in this case, has ten working days to pass the file on to the single points of contact of the host member states, to ESMA and to the European Banking Authority, and must tell the provider without delay once it has done so.
The provider may start in a host country from the date it receives that message, or at the latest from the 15th calendar day after it submitted its notification. Host authorities do not grant a second licence.
For newcomers, our guide to the MiCA regulation explains the licence types and the transition deadlines, and the MiCA glossary entry gives the short version.
ESMA’s register update: nine additions, 375 providers
YouHodler was one of nine providers added in the 16 October update, according to Cointelegraph’s count published on 19 October. The file Coindaro downloaded carries a last-modified time of 15:36 GMT on 16 October. It has 378 rows for 375 unique providers, against 370 entries in the file of 7 October that Coindaro checked last week. One firm left the list: Denmark’s Penning Financial Services, listed since 3 July.
Cointelegraph named six of the nine. ESMA does not publish a list of changes, so the three others cannot be confirmed from a single file. The newcomers Coindaro could match in the 16 October file are below, with the services and passport countries their rows show.
| Provider (brand) | Authority, home state | Services in the register | Countries listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouHodler Italy S.r.l. (YouHodler) | Consob, Italy | custody, crypto-for-funds, crypto-for-crypto, order execution, transfers | 27 (all EU states) |
| MEGE zweite GmbH (BingX EU) | FMA, Austria | custody, crypto-for-funds, crypto-for-crypto, transfers | 28 |
| Prakma Markets S.L. (Goin Crypto) | CNMV, Spain | custody, reception and transmission of orders, transfers | 3 (Spain, France, Italy) |
| Openbank Deutschland AG (Santander group) | BaFin, Germany | custody, order execution | 1 (Germany) |
| VR-Bank Alb-Blau-Donau eG | BaFin, Germany | order execution | 1 (Germany) |
| VR Bank im südlichen Franken eG | BaFin, Germany | order execution | 1 (Germany) |
The BingX entry closes the gap Coindaro reported on 16 October, when the exchange had announced its Austrian licence but ESMA’s register did not show it yet: BingX’s Austrian company now appears, with the FMA as its authority.
Germany still dominates the register with 109 rows. 101 of them are Article 60 notifications, the short route for banks and other firms already licensed in finance, and 62 cover order execution alone, often a cooperative bank adding crypto trading for its own customers. Large banks use the same route, as Deutsche Bank did earlier this month. France follows with 36, the Netherlands with 29, Cyprus with 25 and Malta with 23. Austria now has 12 and Italy 10. According to Cointelegraph, the list of non-compliant firms gained five names, to 178, the register of e-money tokens was unchanged at 50 entries for 25 issuers, and the register of asset-referenced tokens is still empty.
One caution on dates. The register is an interim spreadsheet, and some rows carry dates without a year or dates that have not happened yet. The Italian rows, YouHodler’s included, show only a day and a month, so the date in this article comes from the Consob resolution, not from the file. ESMA says it updates the register at weekly intervals; national decisions can take several days to appear. YouHodler’s row was last updated on 12 October, four days after the Consob decision and four days before publication.
For Italian readers: Consob replaces the OAM list
In Italy, Consob grants MiCA licences to crypto-asset service providers; in YouHodler’s case it did so after hearing the Bank of Italy. YouHodler is the tenth Italian provider in ESMA’s register, after CheckSig, CoinFlip (Olliv Italia), RIV-Digital, Conio, Banca Sella, Cryptosmart, Young Platform, Hodli and Hercle.
The release puts the shift in figures. At the end of the transitional period in June, it says, nine firms had been authorised, “against some 140 operators that had been on the OAM register”, while about 1.7 million Italians hold crypto-assets.
YouHodler was one of those without one. After 1 July, according to Finanza Digitale, it stopped accepting new crypto purchases from Italian users while it waited for Consob. Custody of existing holdings, transfers to other wallets, conversion to fiat and withdrawals stayed available, and the company said it would return to full operation once authorised. It has not announced the date on which new purchases reopen.
One detail for Italian users who check before signing up: on 19 October, the footer of youhodler.com still described YouHodler Italy as “Registered as a VASP with the OAM”, without mentioning the Consob authorisation. The ESMA register and Consob’s resolution are the documents to rely on.
For French readers: France is on the list, not yet on the map
France appears in YouHodler’s passport column. If the notification goes through, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) would be the host authority, and YouHodler Italy would need no separate French licence. The AMF keeps its own lists of authorised providers and of firms it warns against, which French readers can check alongside ESMA’s file.
Nothing published so far says YouHodler Italy is open to French residents today. The register line alone does not answer that question, and the company has given no date for France or any other country outside Italy. Readers comparing platforms can use our checklist for choosing a crypto exchange, which starts with the licence and the exact entity behind an account.
Open questions and the next register update
Several points remain unanswered as of 19 October:
- Whether YouHodler Italy has filed its Article 65 notification for the 26 countries in the register, and if so, on which date.
- Which of the brand’s yield, borrowing and trading products Italian clients of the licensed entity can use, and under what legal basis.
- Whether customers of other YouHodler entities in the EU will be moved to the Italian company, and on what terms.
- Which three of the nine new providers Cointelegraph counted but did not name.
The next ESMA register file is due around Friday 23 October if the weekly rhythm holds. Coindaro will check it for any change to YouHodler’s row and for the first passport countries where the company starts accepting customers.