What the public register actually shows.

The count

Sixty-two live, and it reconciles exactly.

The FCA maintains a public register of cryptoasset firms registered under the money laundering regulations. Read on 22 August 2026, its cryptoasset search returned 68 rows. Sixty-two carried the status “MLRs Registered”. Six carried “Formerly MLRs Registered”.

Separately, the FCA publishes registration statistics on its own page about who needs to register. As at 1 August 2026, that page records 68 firms registered since January 2020. The two reconcile without a residual: 62 live plus 6 formerly registered equals 68, and 68 is the number the FCA publishes. No row is unaccounted for and no registered firm is missing.

That reconciliation is the reason the figure can be relied on rather than merely reported. A count of rows on a screen is an observation. A count of rows that lands exactly on the regulator’s own published total is a checked observation.

A note on how this was obtained, because it affects how much weight the number carries. The FCA Register’s cryptoasset firm search is a browser application. It returns an application shell rather than firm data to anything that is not a browser, so the rows were read from the register in a browser on 22 August 2026 and counted individually. That is a public source read in the ordinary way. It is not a machine-readable feed, and this page does not present it as one.

The determination record

Four hundred and twelve applications. Sixty-eight registrations.

The FCA’s published statistics, as at 1 August 2026, cover every application since 10 January 2020. Four hundred and twelve were received. Three hundred and ninety-one have been determined. The four outcomes reconcile to that total exactly.

1. Registered

   68. Seventeen per cent of determinations.

2. Rejected

   46. Twelve per cent.

3. Withdrawn

   263. Sixty-seven per cent.

4. Refused

   14. Four per cent.

5. Still in flight

   21. The difference between 412 received and 391 determined. The register carries determined registrations only, so these firms are not named on it.

Read those rows together and one figure stands out. Three hundred and nine of the 391 determinations, or 79 per cent, ended in withdrawal or rejection rather than in a decision to refuse. Rejection and refusal are not the same event. A rejected application is one the FCA did not take forward as submitted. A refusal is a decision on the merits, and there have been fourteen since January 2020.

The recent record is materially better, and the change is in the withdrawals. In the previous twelve months the FCA received 32 applications and determined 23. Thirteen were registered, 56 per cent against 17 per cent across the whole period. Eight were withdrawn, 35 per cent against 67 per cent across the whole period. Two were rejected. None was refused. In the most recent month the FCA received 5 and determined 3: one registered, one rejected, one withdrawn.

Set the recent column against the lifetime column and the shape of the process has changed. Two determinations in three used to end in withdrawal. Now it is roughly one in three. The published statistics do not say why, and this page will not guess. What they do say is that the process has stopped consuming most of what enters it.

These figures describe registration under the money laundering regulations. That is a different test, applied by a different part of the FCA, from authorisation under FSMA. They are set out here as the published record of one process, not as a forecast of another.

Attrition

Six firms have left the register since January 2020.

Six of the 68 firms ever registered now carry the status “Formerly MLRs Registered”. That is 8.8 per cent of every firm ever registered, across the six years and seven months from 10 January 2020 to 1 August 2026. It is a cumulative share, not a rate per year, and it should not be annualised. The firms concerned are named on the public register and are not named here, because nothing in this analysis turns on which they are, and a status change on a register is not a finding about a business.

The number itself is the interesting part. It is low. Whatever else the UK cryptoasset register is, it is not a churning population. Firms that get on it stay on it. Any model of this market built on an assumption of steady departure is starting from the wrong premise.

Entities and groups

Sixty-two registrations are about fifty-six businesses.

The register counts legal entities. Six commercial groups hold two live registrations each, so 62 registrations resolve to about 56 distinct groups. Both numbers are correct and they answer different questions. Sixty-two is the regulatory population. Fifty-six is closer to the number of businesses behind it. The only error is using one and meaning the other.

That grouping is our own reading and not a field on the register. The public view carries no ownership or group column; the six pairs were identified from the entity names and from public group structures, and 62 less six duplicates gives 56. A stricter test would give 55, because one of the 56 is a joint venture majority-owned by another. Where that line falls is a judgement, which is why the figure is given here as about 56 while the register’s own number is given as 62.

Composition

The composition is the finding, not the count.

A register of crypto firms is not, on the evidence, a register of crypto firms. Start with seven of the 62: banks, an asset manager and brokers whose main business is not cryptoassets. Every entry below is public information on the FCA Register, with the firm reference number and MLRs status effective date it carries there.

1. Standard Chartered Bank

   FRN 114276. Effective 14 July 2025.

2. BlackRock International

   BlackRock International Limited. FRN 178638. Effective 1 April 2025.

3. IG Digital Assets

   IG Digital Assets Limited. FRN 1035380. Effective 30 September 2025.

4. BNY Mellon (International)

   The Bank of New York Mellon (International) Limited. FRN 183100. Effective 22 June 2026.

5. Baillie Gifford

   Baillie Gifford & Co Limited. FRN 119179. Effective 22 June 2026.

6. TP ICAP E&C

   TP ICAP E&C Limited. FRN 146880. Effective 21 November 2022.

7. Interactive Brokers (U.K.)

   Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited. FRN 208159. Effective 12 June 2023.

Five of those seven registered on or after 1 April 2025. The other two have held registrations since November 2022 and June 2023, so this is a movement that began earlier and then accelerated. Two of the five, a global custodian bank and a large asset manager, registered on the same day, 22 June 2026. Eight days later, on 30 June 2026, the FCA published its final rules and the gateway dates.

Those seven are not the whole of it. The live register also carries the UK entities of large payments and brokerage groups. Among them: Robinhood U.K. Ltd (FRN 823590), Paypal UK Ltd (FRN 1000741), Revolut Ltd (FRN 900562), CB Payments Ltd (FRN 900635), Skrill Limited (FRN 900001) and Paysafe Financial Services Limited (FRN 900015). Count those thirteen together and roughly a fifth of the live register is a substantial regulated institution rather than a startup. Anyone using “62 UK crypto firms” as a proxy for a market of small crypto-native businesses is counting a different population from the one they are describing.

The limits of the source

What the register does not contain.

This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that decides what the number can honestly be used for. The register view available to the public carries six columns: firm name, reference number, principal place of business, contact number, MLRs status, and MLRs status effective date.

1. No activity type

   The money laundering regulations recognise two registrable activities, and the FCA sets both out on the page carrying the statistics above. A cryptoasset exchange provider is a business “exchanging, or arranging or making arrangements with a view to the exchange of, cryptoassets for money or money for cryptoassets”, or operating a cryptoasset automated teller machine. A custodian wallet provider provides services “to safeguard, or to safeguard and administer—cryptoassets on behalf of its customers, or private cryptographic keys on behalf of its customers in order to hold, store and transfer cryptoassets”. The public search view does not say which of the two a firm holds. Any classification of these 62 firms by business model is inference from names, addresses and the firms’ own disclosures. It is not read off the register, and it should not be presented as though it were.

2. No applicants

   The 21 applications still in flight are not named and cannot be. The register carries determinations, not pipeline.

3. No restrictions

   Status is shown. Whether a registration carries voluntary or imposed requirements is not shown in this view.

4. No issuers

   Neither of the two activities quoted above is issuance. A firm that issues a stablecoin and does nothing else has nothing to register, so the register cannot enumerate issuers. A register-only search for UK stablecoin issuers will return an incomplete answer and will not say so.

5. No result count

   The view returns rows, not a stated total. Completeness here rests on the reconciliation to the FCA’s published 68, which is exactly why that reconciliation was done.

A worked example of the limit

Where would you look for a UK stablecoin issuer?

Not here, or not only here. The FCA publishes the membership of its stablecoins regulatory sandbox cohort: four firms selected from twenty applications, in a window that ran from 26 November 2025 to 18 January 2026. That page names Monee Financial Technologies, ReStabilise, Revolut and VVTX, each with a description of what it is testing.

Cross-reference the two sources and the point makes itself. Revolut Ltd, one of the four, holds a live cryptoasset registration: FRN 900562, effective 26 September 2022. The other three did not appear anywhere on the register when it was read on 22 August 2026. That is not a gap in anyone’s compliance. It is what happens when you look for an activity in a register that was never built to record it. The register frame and the issuer frame are different populations, and neither source is a substitute for the other.

The scale of that unlisted population comes from elsewhere, and the FCA gives it in its own words. PS26/10: “we have revised our firm population estimates upwards, from 10 to 25 firms”, noting in the same passage that “as of April 2026, ESMA lists 38 stablecoin issuers authorised under MiCa”. And the FCA’s aggregate cost benefit analysis, at paragraph 110: “Currently there is only one fiat-referenced stablecoin issuer located in the UK”. One today, twenty-five expected, thirty-eight authorised across the EU. The register shows none of the three.

The thing worth taking away

A registration is not an authorisation.

Every one of the 62 firms on that register is registered under the money laundering regulations. None of them is, by virtue of that, authorised to carry on the new regulated cryptoasset activities under FSMA. The regime that starts on 25 October 2027 is a different regime with a different test, and it requires its own application.

That is not our inference. On its own page explaining how the gateway will operate, the FCA says of firms already registered under the money laundering regulations that “there will be no automatic conversion and that they will need to secure authorisation by us under FSMA”.

Which means the register is best read as a list of firms that have already been through one FCA assessment and must now go through another. The FCA expects the application period to open on 30 September 2026 and close on 28 February 2027. What turns on that window is set out separately.

What this is not

This is not advice, and it is not about any firm.