About Issafu
Issafu is a reading of financial regulators' own published registers of crypto firms, maintained by Joseph Ellul. Five registers are read on a schedule and reproduced here as published: ESMA's interim MiCA register for the European Economic Area, the New York State Department of Financial Services' virtual currency licensees, Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, the Bermuda Monetary Authority's Digital Asset Business Act licensees, and FINMA's holders of the Swiss FinTech licence. Each firm gets one page carrying its register row and nothing else: the identifier, the authority, the dates, and the services or activities the entry names. Every figure on the site is a count of published rows, and every page says which file it was counted from and on what date.
Why this site exists
This site exists because the answer to "is this firm authorised, and for what" is public and unreadable. Each regulator publishes it in its own format - a CSV, a table on a web page, a search that renders in the browser - with its own words for the same activity, and none of them lines up with the next. A buyer who has to check a counterparty in three regimes reads three sites, in three shapes, and reconciles them by hand. Here that reconciliation is done once, in the open, with each register kept apart rather than blended: a Dubai broker-dealer licence is never shown as a MiCA notification, and a regulator we cannot read is recorded as missing instead of quietly filled in. The name is the question people already ask about a crypto firm before they send it money; the answer here is only ever what a regulator published, never our opinion of the firm.
Who it is for
A firm choosing a crypto counterparty it has to be able to defend, or preparing and maintaining its own authorisation, that needs to know which regulator authorised whom, for what, and whether that reaches its own jurisdiction
Not an investor picking an exchange, not a trader, and not anyone deciding where to put money: nothing here compares products, prices or returns
What it does not do
- No legal or investment advice, and no ruling on your case: whether a permission covers what you intend to do is a question for the authority that granted it and for your own counsel, never a line on this site
- No opinion on the firms listed. Entries are register rows in the register's own order; nothing here ranks, rates, scores or recommends a firm, and a paid listing is a labelled badge or a labelled slot that never changes an order
- No prices, no token data, no yields and no tax treatment: those are different questions for different sites and this one does not answer them
- No estimating around a gap. Where a regulator's register could not be read, it is named with the URL and what it answered, and its jurisdiction is simply absent rather than approximated
What is on this site
1 guides, each with its sources on the page , and the directory.
- Crypto compliance: A crypto firm is either on a financial regulator's register or it is not, and the register says which services it may provide, in which jurisdiction, from which date.
Where the figures come from
ESMA interim MiCA register - crypto-asset service providers (CASPS.csv) (337), retrieved 2026-09-08; NYDFS virtual currency businesses - BitLicense and limited purpose trust charter holders (39), retrieved 2026-09-08; VARA public register - licensed Virtual Asset Service Providers (Dubai) (56), retrieved 2026-09-08; Bermuda Monetary Authority - Digital Assets Business Act licensees (52), retrieved 2026-09-08; FINMA authorised institutions - persons under Article 1b of the Banking Act (the Swiss FinTech licence) (7), retrieved 2026-09-08
Who answers for it
Joseph Ellul, the person who maintains this site and reads every enquiry sent from it.
Reach us
Contact for a question about the site, or hello@issafu.com. The legal terms are on Terms and Privacy.