The Crypto Markets Supervision Act, or KMAG for short, is the German law that enforces the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets. For you as a customer it has one very practical consequence: anyone offering crypto-asset services in Germany needs a licence for it, and the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority is allowed to name providers that lack one. That is exactly what the regulator is doing at the moment, almost daily.

Between late September and early October, BaFin published nine consumer notices on unauthorised business within four days. Five of them concern crypto-asset services, and five close by expressly citing “section 37(4) of the Banking Act, section 10(7) of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act”. That single…