Bybit plans to turn its European operation into a full financial super-app, adding bank accounts with IBANs, tokenized US stocks and regulated derivatives on top of its crypto trading, according to an interview CEO Ben Zhou gave CoinDesk.
The Dubai-based exchange, founded in 2018 with more than 80 million users, has obtained an electronic money institution license from Austria’s Financial Market Authority. It already holds a Markets in Crypto Assets license in Austria, which gives it access to the entire European Union. Zhou said a Markets in Financial Instruments Directive license is about two months away.
“With these three licenses, we will become kind of like Revolut, plus what is currently offered by Bybit,” Zhou said. The EMI license lets users open personal accounts with IBANs, receive salaries, pay bills and make local and third-party transfers. Crypto and stablecoins sit on top of that account layer, so a European user could hold a paycheck, a stablecoin balance and a bitcoin position in one regulated app.
What MiFID unlocks
The MiFID license is the bigger prize. It would allow Bybit to offer regulated derivatives, US equities such as Apple and Tesla, and contracts for difference on commodities including gold, silver and oil. Zhou said the exchange would connect to providers such as Alpaca or Saxo Bank for direct stock access rather than building the pipeline itself, a decision that shortens the timeline by years.
“MiFID is quite powerful, it allows you to do anything with crypto, anything with real stocks,” Zhou said. The exchange will keep its partnership with Kraken’s xStocks framework for tokenized stocks, where Bybit is the largest global partner. “We work with Kraken, we know the team and we talk constantly,” he noted. xStocks have processed more than $25 billion in total transaction volume since launching less than a year ago, with over 85,000 holders across supported networks.
The strategy puts Bybit in direct competition with European neobanks and with Coinbase, which has pushed hard for MiFID-equivalent permissions in the bloc. It also follows a pattern across the industry: exchanges that grew on crypto trading are bolting on traditional assets because regulation now lets them, and because users increasingly want one app for everything.
MiCA alone does not pay
Zhou admitted that the MiCA license by itself is not profitable given the cost of compliance and local competition. That admission matters, because MiCA was billed as the framework that would let crypto firms scale across 27 countries with one passport. In practice, the biggest firms are stacking additional licenses to sell products MiCA does not cover, and the compliance bill keeps rising with each one.
Bybit’s move mirrors what Kraken has done in the United States and Europe. Kraken Financial won access to the Federal Reserve’s payment systems in March, and parent Payward struck a deal with SoFi last week that connects the exchange to a round-the-clock dollar settlement network and lists SoFi’s SoFiUSD stablecoin. Nasdaq’s venture arm invested $100 million in Payward this week at a $21 billion valuation, partly to distribute tokenized Nasdaq stocks with real voting rights.
The overlap is deliberate. Bybit is one of xStocks’ biggest distribution partners, Kraken owns the framework, and Nasdaq wants issuer-sponsored tokens on as many platforms as possible. A user on Bybit in Europe and a user on Kraken in the US would eventually trade the same tokenized equity products through different doors, with the settlement layer shared underneath.
Derivatives are where the money is. Bybit is the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, and most of that volume is perpetual futures. Bringing regulated derivatives into the same app under a MiFID license lets the company keep that business inside the EU rather than watching users route to offshore venues, which is what currently happens for most European derivatives traders. The exchange launched HYPE-margined options in August and keeps expanding its derivatives suite, so the product engine already exists.
The timeline is aggressive. Zhou expects the MiFID license in roughly two months, which would put the full stack, bank accounts, crypto, tokenized stocks and derivatives, live in early 2027. Regulators rarely move that fast, and the Austrian FMA would have to passport the license across the EU, a process that has tripped up other firms. MiFID permissions also come with capital requirements, reporting duties and conduct rules that a crypto-native exchange has never operated under.
Competition is the other constraint. Revolut operates with a full banking license in the EU and UK and has pushed into crypto trading, winning conditional approval for a US bank charter this month. Coinbase holds licenses across the bloc and has deeper US institutional relationships. Bybit’s edge is its derivatives engine and its existing user base in markets where European rivals are thin, particularly Eastern Europe and Turkey-adjacent corridors.
For users, the practical change is account plumbing. An IBAN at Bybit means salary deposits and bill payments land in the same app that holds crypto and tokenized stocks, which removes the transfers between bank and exchange that regulators have spent years trying to supervise. Whether that consolidation makes compliance easier or harder is the question supervisors will answer over the next year. E-money wallets are not deposit insurance vehicles, and European rules cap the protection available if the issuer fails, a difference most users do not understand until they need it.
The move also tests MiCA’s promise. If a crypto exchange can stack EMI, MiCA and MiFID into one EU-regulated app, the bloc becomes a viable home for the largest offshore exchanges, and the shadow of the offshore market shrinks. If the licenses take years and the products stay narrow, the industry’s center of gravity stays in Dubai and Singapore, and Europe keeps writing rules for firms it does not host.
There is a third outcome worth watching: the licenses arrive and the products launch, but European users keep trading derivatives offshore anyway because the fees are lower and the leverage is higher. Bybit would then hold the paperwork without winning the flow, which is the outcome incumbents quietly expect. The next two months of regulatory review will say a lot about which version of Europe’s crypto market the bloc actually built.