Coinhouse wins French payment licence and becomes the stablecoin plumbing for rival platforms

What Coinhouse actually received

Coinhouse, the French crypto platform founded in 2014 as La Maison du Bitcoin, received a payment institution authorisation from the ACPR, France's prudential supervisor, on 24 July 2026. It is a different permission from the MiCA authorisation the platform already obtained from the AMF in May 2026, and it covers something MiCA on its own does not.

Payment institution status lets Coinhouse offer payment services around e-money tokens: EMTs, the stablecoins pegged one-to-one to an official currency. In practice that means EUR CoinVertible (EURCV) and USD Coin (USDC). The company may also handle international settlements and payments, hold and arbitrage investment positions, and give clients access to yield products in DeFi.

‘Obtaining this payment institution licence is a major new step in Coinhouse's strategy,' said Nicolas Louvet, co-founder and chief executive.

Why a payment licence is needed alongside MiCA

This is the detail a lot of European platforms have run into over the past few months. MiCA gives you an authorisation as a CASP: you may custody crypto, execute orders, exchange, advise. But the moment you use a stablecoin to make a payment rather than to hold an investment, you cross into payment services law. A euro stablecoin is electronic money in legal terms, and moving electronic money is a payment service.

The consequence is that a MiCA authorisation alone is not enough if you want to do anything serious with stablecoins: paying out, settling, sending money across borders, processing salaries in EURCV. That requires a second authorisation, and it comes from the ACPR rather than the AMF.

Coinhouse is among the first French crypto firms holding both documents. The May MiCA authorisation covers seven services and close to seventy crypto-assets; the July ACPR licence covers the payment flows around them.

The gap Bitget left behind

The timing is no accident. Bitget stopped serving French clients at the end of June and pointed its French users towards Coinhouse. That is exactly the pattern running through Europe since the MiCA deadline: foreign platforms withdraw from markets where they failed to get authorised, and the customers left behind have to go somewhere.

Coinhouse now has more than 100,000 active client accounts. For a firm that size, a referral from an international exchange is not a footnote but a growth engine, and it explains why the platform is stacking permissions precisely now.

Coinhouse becomes infrastructure for other platforms

The most interesting part of the ACPR authorisation is not in the opening lines of the press release. Coinhouse may act as a payment agent for other crypto-asset service providers that do not hold payment institution status themselves.

That changes the company's role. A platform holding a MiCA authorisation but no payment licence can route its stablecoin traffic through Coinhouse instead of starting its own ACPR process, which takes months and requires its own capital buffer. Coinhouse then sells not only to end customers but to competitors.

That model is entirely ordinary in traditional finance: one party holds the licence, dozens sit underneath it. In the European crypto market it is new, and it shows how fast the sector is drifting towards the banking model.

France keeps building its own crypto layer

France had its own registration regime for crypto firms, the PSAN framework, years before MiCA, and that head start is paying off. French supervisors already knew the sector, the files were already open, and the transition to MiCA went more smoothly there than in countries that only started in 2024.

A second French peculiarity adds to it: EURCV is issued by a subsidiary of Société Générale, making it one of the few euro stablecoins with a major bank behind it. A French platform with a payment licence processing a French bank stablecoin is a closed chain inside the euro area, with no American intermediary.

What it means for you

If you trade in France or Belgium, little changes on your screen today. But three things are now different. First, at a platform holding both authorisations you can not only hold euro stablecoins but use them to pay, which is still not permitted elsewhere in Europe. Second, the chance that such a firm suddenly stops serving you is smaller, because the permissions are already in place. Third, if your platform starts offering stablecoin payments, the name on the licence may differ from the name on the app.

Check where your provider holds its authorisation and which services it actually covers. That information sits in the AMF and ACPR registers, and it is the only way to know who is liable if something goes wrong.

Sources: ACPR, AMF, Coinhouse, crypto.news. Last checked: 27 July 2026.