ECB President Lagarde Pressured Greece to Block Binance's EU License
On September 18, The Wall Street Journal's Angus Berwick reported that ECB President Christine Lagarde personally called Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, urging him not to approve the license application from Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). A deputy chairman of the Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) subsequently informed Binance of this situation.
According to reports, Greek regulators had initially informed the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in early June that they planned to approve Binance's license application, and Binance was recognized by the HCMC as having "complete application materials"; however, the HCMC ultimately changed its position at the last minute and did not approve it. Binance then voluntarily withdrew its MiCA license application submitted in Greece on June 24, citing issues with the "approval process and timeline."
Due to not completing the authorization before the MiCA transition deadline of July 1 (according to Article 143 of the regulation), Binance lost its eligibility to continue providing spot trading, cryptocurrency deposits, and Earn financial products to users within the EU, which reportedly affected the functionality of related accounts for millions of EU users.
Sources cited in the report indicated that Lagarde's concerns about Binance primarily stemmed from the fact that, as the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally, if Binance obtained an EU license, it could accelerate the adoption of dollar-pegged stablecoins in the European market, thereby undermining the digital euro project and the status of euro-denominated alternatives that the ECB is promoting. Notably, under the MiCA framework, the authority to approve licenses for crypto asset service providers lies entirely with national regulators (in this case, the Greek HCMC), and the ECB itself does not have statutory licensing authority.
The report also mentioned that ESMA had previously privately advised several EU member state regulators to reject Binance's license application based on its past compliance issues. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao admitted in 2023 to violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, resulting in Binance paying over $4.3 billion in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice, with Zhao serving four months in prison before being released in 2024 and receiving a presidential pardon in October 2025—this regulatory history is seen as an important background for some EU regulators' reservations about Binance.
From an interest perspective, the core conflict in this incident is the struggle between traditional eurozone monetary sovereignty and the globalization of crypto asset platforms: the ECB is concerned that once a platform like Binance complies within the EU, the scale of transactions and funds denominated in dollar stablecoins on its platform could rapidly expand, diverting funds and payment scenarios that should flow to the euro and digital euro ecosystem; on the other hand, Binance is eager to open up the massive compliant crypto asset market in the EU through a compliant license to recover users and trading volumes lost due to regulatory uncertainty. The pressure is on Binance's pace of business expansion in the EU and the millions of EU users temporarily losing some services; those benefiting are other exchanges and digital euro-related projects that already hold local compliant licenses and are competing for market share in the EU crypto asset market.
In response to the report, a Binance spokesperson stated: "We do not comment on speculation. In Europe, Binance remains committed to operating in a long-term, compliant manner and adhering to the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation." The company also stated that it would continue to seek authorization under MiCA. As of the time of publication, the ECB had not commented on the report.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Binance has long played the role of "expand first, comply later" in global regulatory history—from founder Changpeng Zhao's 2023 admission of guilt for violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, paying over $4.3 billion in fines, and serving time, to facing regulatory friction in multiple jurisdictions including the U.S., U.K., and Netherlands due to compliance issues. This setback in Greece regarding the MiCA license application is the latest reenactment of this historical pattern under the EU's unified regulatory framework.
The main battleground for resource mobilization in this incident is not funding, but regulatory discourse power and inter-agency coordination channels: although ECB President Lagarde does not have statutory approval authority under the MiCA framework, she substantively influenced what should have been an independent administrative approval decision by directly contacting the Greek Prime Minister; at the same time, ESMA was also reported to have privately "suggested" that several member state regulators reject Binance's application, indicating that the EU's regulatory coordination mechanism is being used as a tool to bypass national statutory approval powers and set implicit barriers against specific platforms.
A comparable case is Europe's previous pushback against large American tech platforms (such as Facebook's Libra/Diem project) when they sought to establish payment operations in Europe—also driven by concerns over non-euro-denominated payment/settlement tools impacting local currency sovereignty and existing clearing systems, European regulators ultimately used multiple coordination methods to force these projects to abandon their ambitions in the European market. The current competition for global stablecoin and crypto asset compliance licenses is at a critical stage where major central banks and private crypto platforms are vying for "who will lead the next generation of payment infrastructure"; the EU internally hopes to prioritize the digital euro ecosystem and does not want to see dollar stablecoins infiltrate the European market through compliant exchanges.
This incident is essentially a power struggle behind regulatory changes: the EU's intention with MiCA was to establish a unified and transparent compliance framework for crypto assets, but when the framework encounters specific, sufficiently large applicants (like Binance), the supranational central bank authority chooses to bypass statutory national approval processes and directly intervene in specific approval decisions. Mechanically, this exposes the structural tension between the EU's "unified monetary policy authority" and "decentralized financial regulatory enforcement authority"—when a private platform's scale is large enough to potentially impact monetary policy goals (such as the market penetration rate of the digital euro), even without statutory authorization, institutions with greater discourse power will intervene in what should be independent regulatory decisions through informal channels.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- No approval authority does not mean no veto power
- Scale large enough to impact currency will attract monetary authorities
- Compliance is both a threshold and the final bargaining chip.