MiCA does not list staking, but custodial providers still need a licence. Germany's cut-off was December 2025, not July 2026. Tax rules treat rewards as income with a 256-euro threshold and a one-year holding period for coins.
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The European crypto regulation MiCA has applied across the EU without transitional relief since July 1, 2026. Coverage since then has centred on the exchanges that left the European market. For staking the picture is murkier, and there is a simple reason for it: the regulation does not recognise the term as a service in its own right.
Anyone delegating coins through a provider still has a clear question to answer. Does that provider need a licence, and what happens to the balances it holds if it does not?
Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 works from an exhaustive list of crypto-asset services. Recital 21 groups them into two sets. The first covers the operation of a trading platform, the exchange of crypto-assets for funds or for other crypto-assets, the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients, and transfer services. The second covers placement, the reception, transmission and execution of orders, advice and portfolio management.
Staking does not appear anywhere in that list. It would be wrong, though, to conclude from this that staking is unregulated. The licensing requirement attaches to what the provider actually does, not to the label on the product. Almost every staking offering aimed at retail investors involves at least one of the listed activities.
Deposit your coins with a platform and press its staking button, and you hand over the private keys. That is precisely the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients from the first set. Whether the provider then delegates the balance to a validator, places it in a pool or settles it internally makes no difference to the licensing requirement.
Custodial staking means that a third party holds the keys. This covers centralised exchanges, broker apps and most providers that advertise rewards as an annual percentage. Such firms are fully subject to authorisation as crypto-asset service providers, or CASPs.
Authorisation brings obligations that rarely surface in day-to-day use but make the difference when something goes wrong: the segregation of client holdings from proprietary ones, requirements on organisation and complaints handling, disclosure duties. In Germany the Crypto Markets Supervision Act, the KMAG, implements the regulation and provides in Section 45 that a crypto-asset held in custody for a client is deemed to belong to that client. In the insolvency of the institution, that is the basis for separating it from the estate.
The protection is not unlimited. The statute expressly excludes the case where the client has consented to the asset held in custody being disposed of for the account of the institution or of third parties. Agree to the terms of a provider that passes the coins on or deploys them for its own account, and you may forfeit the very attribution that counts in an insolvency. For staking clients this is the most consequential line in the act, and it does not appear in the marketing material.
Keep the keys yourself and delegate straight from your wallet to a validator, and no intermediary sits between you and the network. Recital 22 of the regulation records that crypto-asset services provided in a fully decentralised manner without any intermediary fall outside its scope. The upside is that there is no provider that can fail and take your coins with it. The price is that there is no supervision, and no claim against anyone if a validator is misconfigured and triggers slashing. Wallet interfaces change nothing as long as the keys stay with you. As soon as a service takes in coins and pools them, the case falls back under the licensing requirement.
A misunderstanding has proved stubborn here. Article 143(3) of the regulation allowed providers that had supplied their services before December 30, 2024 under applicable national law to carry on until July 1, 2026, or until their application for authorisation had been decided. The same paragraph expressly permits member states to disapply that transitional regime or to shorten its duration.
Germany shortened it. Section 50(2) no. 3 of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act provides that the authorisation deemed to continue lapses at the end of December 31, 2025 at the latest. Anyone seeking to rely on the old law therefore had six months less than the European framework allowed. July 1, 2026 was never the operative cut-off for incumbent German providers.
In practice this means that a provider offering you staking today, holding your coins and invoking an old German registration, has had a problem since the beginning of 2026. Either an authorisation is in place or a valid legal basis is missing.
The evidence takes a few minutes to gather. Authorised providers are notified by the national supervisor and listed in the European registers; BaFin also maintains a company database of its own. Two points matter more than they first appear to. First, the legal entity is what counts, and the brand name often obscures it. Many groups run several companies, and the authorisation attaches to a particular legal person with a home state. If the imprint names a different company from the one in the register, the matter is unresolved. Second, an authorisation covers only certain services: a firm can be licensed for exchange and custody without anything following from that about an individual yield product.
The licensing question settles where your balance sits and says nothing about what the tax office makes of the income. For private investors the German tax authorities routinely treat staking rewards as income from services under Section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act. The statute provides that such income is not subject to income tax where it came to less than 256 euros in the calendar year.
The mechanism is a cut-off threshold, which is something other than an allowance. At 255 euros everything stays tax-free; at 256 euros the full amount becomes taxable. The threshold also applies to all other income of this kind taken together, so anyone running lending alongside staking has to add the amounts up. Receipts are valued at the price on the day they accrue, which calls for clean records where payouts arrive daily.
Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the Income Tax Act covers disposals of other assets within one year. Sentence 4 extends that period to ten years where income is generated in at least one calendar year from the use of the asset as a source of income. Read the provision for the first time and staked coins look like a ten-year case.
The tax authorities take a different view. Under the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto-assets, staking and lending do not extend the disposal period. Several specialist publications report this consistently, among them the advisory firms CMS and Winheller. For the coins deployed, the period therefore remains one year.
The rewards themselves follow a calculation of their own. On receipt they count as acquired and start their own one-year clock. Sell them at a gain within that year and Section 23 applies on top; there, gains stay tax-free where the total gain from private disposals in the calendar year comes to less than 1,000 euros. A reward showing up twice, once on receipt and once on sale, is the most common error in self-prepared records.
A CASP authorisation belongs to the world of supervision; it is no guarantee of returns. Whether an advertised yield is achievable, whether a validator runs reliably, or whether you can reach your balance quickly in an emergency: a licence says nothing about any of it.
Three variables determine the actual risk. Slashing describes the mechanism by which a network penalises the faulty behaviour of a validator by deducting from the stake. Lock-up denotes the period for which the holding is tied up. The withdrawal period governs how long unwinding takes, and technical network periods can diverge from a provider's internal ones. There is no statutory deposit protection for crypto-assets of the kind that exists for bank balances.
Two questions are enough to classify it. First: can you move the coins without a company's involvement? Second: does your stake earn you a claim against a company, or a token anchored in the protocol?
For staking through a centralised exchange the answer to the first question is no, and to the second: a claim against the company. The licensing requirement then applies in full. Delegating from your own wallet leaves control with you. Liquid staking sits between the two, because you receive a tradable token whose legal classification depends on how the protocol is arranged. For tax purposes the swap into the liquid staking token can itself trigger a disposal; no ruling from the highest court has settled the point so far.
The primary sources to read for yourself: the full text of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 with the transitional measures in Article 143, and the Crypto Markets Supervision Act with the German shortening in Section 50 and the attribution rule in Section 45.
(As of August 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
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