Exchanges Companies in Europe

Nik Storonsky was born in Dolgoprudny, Russia, and moved to London in 2006 to work as an equity derivatives trader, first at Lehman Brothers and later at Credit Suisse. Vlad Yatsenko was a software engineer who'd spent years building financial systems. In 2015 they sat down and asked a question that should have occurred to banks years earlier: why does spending money abroad still cost so much? The answer they built was Revolut — initially a prepaid card with no foreign exchange fees, then a multi-currency account, then a trading platform, then an insurance product, then a business banking offering, then something that's increasingly hard to describe as anything other than a full financial operating system. Revolut didn't unbundle banking so much as rebuild it from scratch for people who found the existing version frustrating and expensive. The numbers now are genuinely striking for a company that started with two people and a card. Revenue reached £4.5 billion in 2025, up 46% year on year, with pre-tax profit rising 57% to £1.7 billion. The customer base has passed 75 million retail users, plus 767,000 businesses. The company employs more than 12,000 people and operates in more than 40 markets. In July 2026, a secondary share sale valued Revolut at $115 billion — up from $75 billion just eight months earlier, and more than the market capitalisation of Barclays. It remains Europe's most valuable private technology company by a wide margin. The milestone that mattered most arrived in March 2026: a full UK banking licence from the Prudential Regulation Authority, ending a five-year application process that had become one of the most-watched regulatory sagas in European fintech. The licence means Revolut can now protect UK deposits up to £120,000, offer authorised consumer credit, and compete directly with high street banks for mortgage and lending business. It's the piece that transforms Revolut from a very successful payments app into a regulated bank. The global licensing map is filling in quickly, with one persistent gap. In July 2026 Revolut became the first global fintech granted a full Australian Deposit-taking Institution licence by APRA — a regulator whose capital requirements have defeated several domestic neobanks — and launched Revolut Bank Australia. In August it secured a French banking licence, a significant step given that France is its largest European market outside the UK and that holding a local licence rather than passporting from Lithuania changes how it can compete there on lending and deposits. It has also opened its first bank outside Europe, in Mexico. The exception is the United States, where a banking charter application filed in 2024 remains pending — in a period when the OCC has rejected applications from both Wise and bunq. Around the licences, the product keeps widening past banking: private markets access for European retail customers through funds from Apollo, Ares and Partners Group; a partnership with OpenAI bringing ChatGPT Go to premium tiers; eSIM data plans; and an airport lounge network starting in Copenhagen. The original thesis — that banking could be cheaper, faster, and simpler — hasn't changed. What has changed is that Revolut is no longer only selling banking.

Bitcoin exchanges in Europe's early crypto years were characterised by technical fragility, regulatory opacity, and the constant possibility that the platform you were using would simply disappear. Paymium was founded in Paris in 2011 as one of Europe's first Bitcoin exchanges and has the unusual distinction of still operating today — a survival record that sets it apart from the majority of its early-era peers. Its longevity reflects a deliberate choice to operate as a regulated financial institution from the beginning, obtaining French regulatory authorisation and maintaining compliance standards that many early crypto platforms treated as optional. Paymium serves both retail and institutional users in the French market, offering Bitcoin trading with the regulatory framework and consumer protection standards of a licensed payment institution. In the contemporary European crypto landscape — dominated by Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken — Paymium is a niche player by volume but a significant one by longevity and regulatory credibility. For French institutional investors and the segment of retail users who prioritise regulatory protection over trading fees, Paymium's fifteen-year track record of compliant operation is a genuine differentiator in an industry where that record is extraordinarily rare.

MoonPay sits at the intersection of crypto and traditional finance, offering on and off-ramps that let people move money between their bank account and crypto wallets with minimal friction. Founded in 2018, the London-based company has quietly become one of Europe's most important infrastructure plays in the emerging crypto economy, handling billions in transactions across more than 150 countries. What sets MoonPay apart is its unglamorous but essential positioning: it's not trying to be a crypto exchange or a trading platform. Instead, it's the plumbing layer that makes crypto accessible to ordinary people. You buy crypto through MoonPay the same way you'd buy a digital service—seamless, compliant, and fast. The company operates with full EU regulation, holding licenses across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining the kind of compliance rigor that traditional banks expect. MoonPay's API-first approach means startups, wallets, and even traditional fintech apps can embed crypto purchasing directly into their user experience. This white-label capability has attracted partnerships with everyone from music platforms to gaming studios. The company has raised substantial funding and is valued at over a billion dollars, a testament to how critical crypto infrastructure has become. In a market obsessed with trading speculation and yield farming, MoonPay represents something more fundamental: the normalization of crypto as a payment asset class. It's doing for cryptocurrency what Stripe did for online payments—removing the technical and regulatory barriers that kept it confined to specialists.

Blockchain.com is one of the oldest and most-visited crypto infrastructure platforms in the world, operating as a bridge between traditional finance and digital assets. The company runs a full-stack crypto ecosystem—a blockchain explorer that millions use to track transactions, a self-custody wallet that puts users in control of their private keys, and a suite of institutional-grade services for serious players. Where most crypto platforms treat blockchain as a trading venue, Blockchain.com treats it as infrastructure. The platform serves retail users seeking transparency and control, developers building on-chain applications, and institutions entering crypto with proper compliance frameworks. The company has maintained a distinctly crypto-native stance while gradually building enterprise services that acknowledge regulatory reality. Its wallet remains one of the most downloaded in the space, offering both simplicity for newcomers and advanced features for power users. Blockchain.com sits at an interesting inflection point in fintech—old enough to have survived multiple market cycles, serious enough to work with regulators, yet still fundamentally aligned with decentralized principles. The platform's role in the broader landscape is foundational: it enables crypto participation across the entire user spectrum, from curious individuals to multinational corporations managing digital asset reserves.

CEX.IO is a cryptocurrency exchange that's been operating since 2013, making it one of Europe's older players in the digital asset space. The platform lets users buy, sell, and trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a growing roster of altcoins through a web interface and mobile app. It's positioned itself as a regulated exchange with fiat on-ramps, meaning you can fund your account with euros or other currencies through bank transfers and cards, then move into crypto—a crucial bridge that separates real exchanges from purely peer-to-peer platforms. The company operates across multiple jurisdictions and maintains compliance frameworks that matter to retail traders in Europe who want institutional-grade infrastructure without the complexity of decentralized exchanges. CEX.IO doesn't reinvent fintech architecture; instead, it focuses on being reliable, regulated, and accessible for mainstream users discovering cryptocurrency. In the fragmented European crypto landscape, where regulation remains patchy and trust is everything, CEX.IO represents the pragmatic middle ground between full decentralization and traditional finance's gatekeeping.

Crypto for institutions requires a different product than crypto for retail. The compliance requirements, the custody standards, the reporting obligations, and the client servicing expectations of professional investors are categorically different from those of an individual buying Bitcoin through an app. Coinhouse was founded in Paris in 2014 as one of France's first regulated crypto asset service providers, building a platform designed for the higher standards that institutional and professional clients require. Its services cover crypto trading, custody, staking, and portfolio management for professional investors — with the regulatory standing of a PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) registration under France's crypto asset framework. Coinhouse has positioned itself as the French institutional crypto bridge — the regulated, professional-grade alternative to the consumer exchanges that dominate by volume but not by client sophistication. In the European institutional crypto market, where MiCA regulation is creating clearer requirements for crypto asset service providers, platforms that have already built their compliance infrastructure to institutional standards are better positioned than those scrambling to retrofit regulation onto consumer products.