Key takeaways
France Approves Bull
Francis Pouliot announced that Bull Bitcoin obtained a MiCA license in France, allowing EU users to keep using the service after the new regime takes full effect. Source QA also found an AMF whitelist entry for LEONOD SARL, approval number A2026-019, with an approval date of June 22 and a listed service category for exchanging crypto-assets for funds.
The announcement says the license came after nearly three years of self-funded work. Bull also says users in EU member states can continue using its exchange and payment services without interruption or reduction in functionality. The company is positioning the approval as proof that self-custody and privacy features do not have to be stripped out simply because a regulator demands authorization.
Custody Survived The Process
That is the important claim. Bull says its website, wallet behavior, and user experience remain the same as they were in the first half of 2026. The service supports self-custody, Payjoin, Lightning, and Liquid, and Bull says it preserved privacy-oriented features while passing the audits required to operate under MiCA.
The firm also says it passed PASSI and DORA audits without outsourcing core Bitcoin infrastructure to hosted third-party providers. That part matters because outsourcing is often the cheap compliance path. It can also turn a sovereign product into a stack of vendors, dashboards, and data trails. Bull is arguing that the harder path was possible, even if it took years and real operational discipline. Bitcoin Magazine adds one useful caveat: the public announcement does not fully explain how Bull resolved every tension between privacy expectations and MiCA compliance, so the privacy claim should stay attributed to Bull rather than treated as an official regulatory finding.
The Moat Still Matters
None of this makes MiCA good. It proves the opposite tension. Bull clearing the process weakens the excuse from companies that abandoned custody or privacy because compliance supposedly gave them no choice. But a three-year, self-funded licensing push also shows how expensive the permission game has become. A company can be excellent at the product and still spend years proving itself to a regime that many future competitors may never survive.
That is how regulation distorts the market. Firms with capital, lawyers, audit budgets, and long planning cycles get a path through. Smaller Bitcoin-native teams can build better products and still run into a wall before users ever get to judge them. Compliance becomes a determinant of survival before product quality, fees, security, or user trust can compete on equal terms.
Why It Matters
Bitcoin companies now have less room to hide behind vague compliance theater. If Bull can keep self-custody and privacy while clearing a demanding EU process, users can ask every other platform what exactly was impossible and what was merely inconvenient. The mechanism here is custody. A service that makes users give up control of keys, privacy tools, or settlement options changes more than a feature list. It changes the user's relationship to Bitcoin. At the same time, MiCA still creates a permission moat that favors firms able to survive a long regulatory gauntlet. Bull's win is real. The lesson is not that MiCA works. The lesson is that execution can beat lazy excuses, while the regime still punishes smaller builders that never get the same runway.
