MiCA and crypto payments: why the cheap provider can become the most expensive decision

With MiCA now in force, Europe’s crypto infrastructure is moving toward licensed providers, and that changes the decision framework for crypto payments almost immediately. For iGaming operators, fintechs, institutional clients, and the PSPs that serve them, the real question is no longer “what is the fee?” but “what happens when the provider cannot survive the compliance load?”

1. According to Dave Pulis, cofounder of ZBX, the end of the MiCA transition period has left hundreds of European VASP companies effectively unable to continue operating in their old format. The practical result is straightforward: more market participants are now looking for licensed partners because doing it themselves is no longer viable under the new rules.
2. ZBX has stepped away from retail and now focuses entirely on B2B clients, institutional investors, iGaming operators, fintech companies, and family offices. The company says it built regulated infrastructure for almost seven years, well before MiCA created mass demand for compliance-ready crypto payments.
3. ZBX has obtained a MiCA CASP licence, putting it among a limited group of fully licensed crypto infrastructure companies in Europe. That matters because, in Pulis’s view, the old habit of choosing the cheapest crypto service without checking the regulatory setup is exactly where operators get burned later.
4. Pulis’s list of failure modes for unlicensed providers is the one operators should actually price in: blocked funds, bankruptcy, shutdown, or the company disappearing with client assets. In other words, the headline fee may be lower, but the real cost sits in legal exposure, operational disruption, and the possibility that the payment chain breaks at the worst possible time.
5. He also points out that crypto is not the same as picking a traditional PSP. The key factor is not processing cost; it is the resilience of the whole infrastructure. Licensed setups require постоянный AML control, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and the ability to hand regulators a full transaction history. Without that, an operator may not be able to prove where the funds came from or explain specific transactions during a review.

ZBX says it holds client assets through licensed custodians with additional insurance, which reduces the risk of asset loss. Pulis’s final point is the one that tends to arrive after the damage is done: companies often only start asking about licensed solutions after a partner freezes funds, goes bankrupt, or the money simply disappears. By then, the “cheap” option has already become the expensive one.