MiCA is forcing every crypto company in Europe to look trustworthy. Most are about to make the same mistake.

Lately the same brief keeps landing on my desk, just worded differently each time: we don’t want to look like crypto anymore.

It comes from payment companies, exchanges, stablecoin startups — the ones that spent years looking like the future and now want to look like a bank. Well, not a bank. A neobank. Fast, clean, regulated, safe to hand your money to. The first thing they ask me to kill is the gradient.

This isn’t taste catching up. It’s MiCA. In two weeks you can’t operate in European crypto without a license — and a licensed company that still looks like a 2021 DeFi protocol has a problem its lawyers can’t fix.

So the…