- Crypto firms serving UK customers can now apply to the Financial Conduct Authority for full authorisation for the first time. The FCA says firms intending to keep operating here should apply by 28 February 2027.
- The regime itself only takes legal effect on 25 October 2027. Firms that have applied can carry on in the meantime, new customers included.
- Nothing has been granted yet. The FCA’s description of this as a landmark moment is its own framing of a window opening, not an outcome anyone can point to.
The exchange holding your coins has, until now, answered to the FCA on one thing: money laundering checks. From this week it can apply to be regulated on rather more than that. The application window for full authorisation is open, and the rulebook behind it takes effect on 25 October 2027.
Nothing about your account changes this week. A firm that applies can keep trading exactly as it is while the FCA works through the application, taking on new customers included, and the consumer protections attached to the new regime do not exist in law until October 2027.
The question that lands on holders is a later one. Does the platform you use apply, and does it get through? A firm that doesn’t apply, or applies and is refused, won’t be able to go on offering regulated cryptoasset services to people in the UK, which means some customers will be finding a new home for their coins at some point in the next couple of years.
What authorisation actually is
Authorisation is the ordinary permission that banks, brokers, insurers and investment platforms hold. It is a standing relationship with the regulator: capital requirements, rules on how customer money is held, conduct standards, and the ability for the FCA to intervene when a firm falls short of them.
That is a different and much wider thing from the registration most UK crypto firms already have. Since 2020, crypto businesses serving UK customers have had to register with the FCA under the money laundering regulations, which checks a firm’s anti-money-laundering controls and little else. Plenty of readers have seen “FCA registered” on a platform’s website and reasonably assumed it meant the regulator had looked at the business. It didn’t.
Under the new regime, the FCA says applicants will be assessed against standards covering consumer protection, safeguarding of customer assets, market integrity and financial resilience. Safeguarding is the one worth knowing by name. It means keeping customer coins separate from the firm’s own money, so that a company failing doesn’t take its customers’ holdings down with it. That is the specific thing that went wrong at FTX, and it is the reason a lot of people moved to holding their own keys instead.
The dates, and the gap between them
The FCA published its final crypto rules and guidance in June 2026. Firms that want to keep operating in the UK should apply by 28 February 2027, and the regime comes into force on 25 October 2027. The regulator is running pre-application support meetings and has webinars available on demand.
Between those two dates sits a transitional arrangement that is easy to misread. An existing firm that applies during the window can continue providing cryptoasset services, including taking on new business, while its application is assessed, provided no decision has been made before the new regime takes effect. So for most of the next thirteen months, a platform describing itself as “in the process of FCA authorisation” is telling you something true and almost nothing about whether it will get there.
What the FCA said, and what it hasn’t shown
In its press release, Dominic Cashman, the FCA’s Director of Authorisation, said: “The UK’s new crypto regime will give consumers greater protections and firms a clear framework to operate in. Firms can now apply for authorisation and start preparing for regulation.”
The same release calls the opening a landmark moment and a significant milestone, and frames it as a step towards the UK becoming one of the most trusted places in the world to build and invest in cryptoasset businesses. Those are the regulator’s own characterisations of a step it has just taken, rather than anything measured from outside. No firm has been authorised. The release does not say how many have applied, how many the FCA expects to authorise, or what proportion it thinks will fall short.
Authorisation also attaches to the firm, not to what the firm sells. A platform clearing the FCA’s bar does not mean the coins listed on it have been assessed, endorsed or made any safer, and the FCA’s long-standing position is that cryptoassets are high risk and buyers should be prepared to lose everything they put in. The protection being built here is about how a business holds your money and treats you as a customer. The price of the thing you bought is still entirely your problem.
What to watch
The names on the list, and the names missing from it. By late February 2027 the application window closes, and any sizeable platform that hasn’t applied is effectively telling UK customers it plans to leave. The money laundering registration round a few years ago produced a long trail of withdrawn applications from firms that found the bar higher than expected, and it would be no surprise if some smaller or offshore operators quietly geo-block the UK rather than go through this.
Also worth watching is how much the FCA publishes about refusals. A regime that approves everyone that applies delivers very little, and a regime that refuses firms without saying why leaves their customers guessing. Our ongoing coverage of UK rules sits in Policy, and if your issue is getting money to and from a platform in the first place, that’s a separate and more immediate problem covered in our guide to UK banks and crypto payments.