France: AMF's PSAN Regime and Early MiCA Leadership

France arrived at crypto regulation early and with unusual intent. While most European regulators spent 2018 and 2019 watching Bitcoin’s volatility with studied alarm, the Autorité des marchés financiers took a different posture: it began drafting a framework. The result, embedded in the PACTE Law of May 2019, created the Prestataires de Services sur Actifs Numériques (PSAN) regime — France’s registered digital asset service provider framework. It was the first major European country to create one, and the design choices France made in 2019 would shape its competitive position when MiCA arrived five years later.

The Regulatory Architecture

France operates a dual regulatory structure for financial services that carries over into digital assets. The Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) is the securities and investment regulator, equivalent to the SEC in the United States or the FCA in the United Kingdom. Alongside it sits the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR), the banking and insurance supervisor that operates within the Banque de France. For crypto-assets, jurisdiction falls primarily to the AMF, with ACPR retaining oversight where digital asset activities intersect with banking or payment services.

This division matters. An exchange offering only spot crypto trading fell under AMF. An exchange issuing electronic money instruments or offering payment services would engage ACPR. The largest players — those operating full-service platforms — needed to manage relationships with both.

The PSAN Framework: Design and Reality

The PACTE Law established two tiers. The first was mandatory registration: any entity providing custody of digital assets or buying and selling digital assets against fiat currency for clients was required to register with the AMF. Registration involved AML/CFT checks aligned with FATF standards, basic organisational requirements, and fit-and-proper assessments of management. There was no minimum capital requirement at the registration level.

The second tier was optional licensing. PSAN providers could voluntarily seek a more demanding licence, which required additional standards on cybersecurity, custody practices, conflict of interest management, and client disclosure. The optional licence was designed to signal quality — a way for reputable operators to differentiate themselves from the minimum-compliant majority.

In practice, the optional licence saw limited uptake. The regulatory burden was significant, the commercial benefit unclear, and the EU legislative horizon — with MiCA on the drawing board from 2020 — created uncertainty about whether investment in PSAN licensing was worthwhile when a new regime would supersede it. Most operators registered at the mandatory level and waited.

Who Registered — and What It Signalled

The list of PSAN-registered entities tells a story about France’s attractiveness as an EU entry point. Binance registered with the AMF in May 2022, at a time when the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume was under regulatory pressure in multiple jurisdictions. French PSAN registration did not confer EU passporting rights — the EU single market for crypto services did not yet exist — but it demonstrated regulatory engagement and provided a credible compliance anchor in one of the EU’s largest economies. Coinbase, Crypto.com, and multiple other major global exchanges followed with their own PSAN registrations. By 2023, over 60 entities had received PSAN registration.

The mandatory registration threshold was later strengthened. A 2023 reform, enacted as part of France’s transposition of the preceding EU regulatory framework, made registration requirements more demanding and introduced an intermediate mandatory stage that effectively narrowed the gap between registration and optional licensing. This was partly a response to market failures — several registered entities had encountered significant difficulties — and partly preparation for MiCA’s arrival.

The Transition to MiCA CASP Licensing

MiCA came into full force for crypto-asset services in December 2024. Under MiCA, all entities providing crypto-asset services in the EU must obtain authorisation as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) from their national competent authority — in France, the AMF. The CASP licence is more demanding than PSAN registration: minimum capital requirements, detailed organisational requirements, mandatory custody safeguards, and comprehensive consumer protection rules.

France implemented an 18-month transition period from December 2024, during which existing PSAN-registered entities could continue operating while applying for CASP authorisation. The AMF established a streamlined review process for PSAN entities seeking CASP status, treating existing PSAN registration as evidence of foundational compliance.

The transition created a shakeout. Smaller, less capitalised entities found the CASP requirements demanding. Some consolidated. Others withdrew from the French market. The AMF made clear that it expected CASP applications to be substantive, not merely formal: the additional requirements around custody, consumer disclosure, and governance were to be genuinely implemented, not treated as compliance theatre.

The AMF’s Supervisory Philosophy

The AMF under successive Chairs has maintained what might be characterised as engaged pragmatism on crypto. It participated actively in ESMA working groups shaping MiCA’s technical standards. It engaged with industry through formal consultation, creating a reputation for regulatory dialogue that attracted firms seeking predictable supervisory relationships.

At the same time, the AMF has not been passive on enforcement. It pursued several unregistered crypto platforms operating in France without PSAN registration, demonstrating that the regime had teeth. Its investor protection warnings — listing platforms it considered high-risk — were referenced in French media and created reputational consequences for named entities.

Paris as European FinTech Hub

France’s government under President Macron made financial services attraction a national priority following Brexit. The Choose France initiative, the Grand Paris projects, and targeted recruitment of financial firms from London positioned Paris as the natural successor to London as Europe’s financial capital in key segments. In crypto and digital assets, this translated into active government support for the AMF’s international outreach and for domestic crypto champions.

The most prominent French crypto success story is Ledger, the hardware wallet manufacturer headquartered in Paris. Ledger’s Nano devices are the global market leader in self-custody crypto hardware, with more than six million units sold. Ledger’s existence gave France a visible, commercially successful native crypto firm that the government could point to as evidence of a healthy domestic sector — and Ledger’s growth was cited in political arguments for why supportive regulation paid dividends.

The Political Economy of French Financial Regulation

France’s approach to financial regulation differs from the Anglo-American model in one fundamental respect: the state is understood as an active partner in the economy, not merely a rule-setter. The AMF operates with this background assumption. Regulation is not purely about investor protection and market integrity — it is also about France’s competitive position in European and global financial services.

This means French regulation tends to ask, alongside the protective questions, the competitive question: does this rule enhance or diminish France’s attractiveness as a location for financial activity? The PSAN regime was partly designed to attract crypto businesses to France. MiCA implementation is being managed, at the AMF level, with the same question in mind. France wants Paris to be the city where European crypto compliance is headquartered — and its regulatory choices reflect that ambition.

The combination of early-mover advantage through PSAN, AMF experience with over sixty registered entities, a sophisticated supervisory approach, and an active government strategy for financial services attraction makes France one of the most important jurisdictions to watch as MiCA matures. The question is whether early experience translates into durable leadership, or whether larger financial centres — Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Dublin — absorb CASP business as the single market normalises crypto services across the EU.