Crypto lending and earn products under MiCA

Many platforms group different things under “earn”: locking a crypto-asset into a proof-of-stake protocol, lending it to the platform, or letting a third party lend it for a rate. Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 names, as crypto-asset services, only the ten activities in Article 3(1)(16). Lending is not among them. Staking as a service does have a public reading from ESMA, and it is not repeated here: it is in staking under MiCA. The ten letters are in CASP services.

What the list closes

Point (16) lists custody, a trading platform, exchange for funds, exchange for other crypto-assets, execution, placing, reception and transmission, advice, portfolio management and transfers. There is no letter for “lending crypto-assets”, or for “borrowing crypto-assets”, or for “paying interest on a balance”. A row in CASPS.csv that carries several of those letters does not, by accumulation, add lending. The checklist is for reading the letters that are there, not for inferring letters the article did not write.

That is not the same as saying lending is allowed or forbidden by some other statute. MiCA does not exhaust credit law, consumer law or securities law. This page does not pick which of those regimes applies to a contract: it does not have the contract, and it is not an opinion. What it can say, because it is in Article 3, is that a CASP authorisation for letters a to j does not include lending merely by existing.

Why it is not staking

Q&A 2067 describes staking as a service: the intermediary immobilises the client’s crypto-assets for the protocol, collects the yield and shares it, and holds the assets in custody. Q&A 2607 forbids the CASP from staking for its own account even with the client’s consent, and it allows sharing. A product in which you hand over the crypto-assets so the platform or a third party can lend them, for a fixed rate, is not that description. There is no validator privilege and no block reward: there is a claim. Treating it as letter a because “it also pays a percentage” mixes the two guides.

It is not an EMT or an ART either. The fact that the balance lent is a stablecoin does not turn the loan into an issue. The token’s regime, where it is offered in the Union, is in stablecoins, EMTs and ARTs. ESMA’s October 2026 opinion is about CASPs providing services in non-compliant tokens, not about characterising a loan contract.

The protection the button does not inherit

Articles 70 and 75 protect crypto-assets a CASP holds in custody for the client: segregation from the provider’s creditors, in accordance with applicable law, and liability for attributable loss, capped at market value. They are explained in custody and client funds. A loan in which the client is no longer the person who can demand the same crypto-asset back at once, and becomes a creditor for a sum or a quantity, is not the case those paragraphs describe. Article 75 does not promise the interest. An “APY” is not a notified letter.

If the platform has no CASP row, lending does not find an authorisation to read there either. The statements about providing services without authorisation are in unauthorised platforms. They do not name particular earn products, and neither does this page.

How to read an offer without over-labelling it

1. See whether the text talks about a validator, a protocol and shared rewards. That vocabulary belongs to the staking guide, not to a loan.
2. See whether the text talks about lending, handing over use, or a fixed rate owed by the platform. That is not in letters a to j.
3. Read who the legal person is and whether it has a row. The brand does not lend: the company does, if the contract is the company’s.
4. Do not use the alternatives page as a list of earn products. That page compares authorisations, not yields.
5. If the question is tax — whether the interest or the reward is declared — the income-tax and calendar guides point to the duty to declare, with the warning that they do not compute your bill.

Common questions