Monoup News Digest: Main Updates from Fintech Industry
It's Friday, which means the Monoup team is on air with the news! We'll wrap up the week and tell you how the licensing saga in Europe ended for Binance (and whether it ended at all), and we'll also discuss further prospects and how MiCA performed in its first few days of official operation.
We'll also analyze the case of Rockstar, the developer of long-awaited GTA 6, which is adding fuel to the fire of scandals around subscription services. We studied buyer reviews of pre-orders and the flow the company currently uses to sell the new game, and noticed that even a business this successful doesn't shy away from what's known as dark patterns in subscriptions. What this could lead to and what it actually is — more on that below.
Binance pauses operations in the EU
As we expected, Binance will have to wait and obtain the proper license for full operation in the European Union. A couple of days before the end of June, exchange notified clients in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain — countries where it held local permits before the new regime was introduced — that it can no longer accept new registrations. As of July 1, part of its services became unavailable across all EU markets: this applies to deposits and opening new spot orders, while withdrawals remain available everywhere, so there's no reason for users to worry. The exchange itself expects to obtain a full license in France within the coming months and states that its overall plan for the European market isn't changing at all, despite the delay in Greece.
At the same time, this doesn't make any financial issue for Binance, since its share of euro-denominated orders isn't very large to begin with, but the situation itself is telling, since Binance turned out not to be the only one running late.
Among the major players without a MiCA license on the European market are also Bitget, MEXC, Bitfinex, and HTX. Bitget, like Binance, didn't manage to complete the process in time, but confirms its intention to stay in the European market. MEXC and Bitfinex haven't commented on the situation at all. HTX doesn't even have theoretical chances — the exchange is under sanctions from the UK regulator, which closes off its access to Europe regardless of whether it holds a license.
The scale of the drop-off is clearly visible in the numbers: of more than 1,200 companies operating under national registrations before the new regime was introduced, just over 200 received full MiCA authorization — less than 20%. The regulator achieved its original goal — small operators without the resources for compliance, and those who never planned to establish themselves in the EU long-term, have left the market.
Ukraine seizes crypto assets in favor of the state for the first time
In Ukraine, crypto assets worth 8.3 million USDT have come under state control — money belonging to a hacker group that was uncovered within the country.
According to the investigation, members of the group attacked individuals and legal entities in the EU and the US, stole confidential data, and demanded ransoms, with the proceeds funneled through the purchase of real estate, vehicles, and other property in Ukraine.
The court seized the group's assets worth more than $11.1 million, and all those involved have been detained. The estimated damage from their activity exceeds $100 million — a figure that makes this one of the most notable cases in Ukraine's practice of crypto asset confiscation and, possibly, sets a precedent for future investigations of this kind. This is the first case in history of a state confiscating cryptocurrency, and most likely won't be the last.
GTA 6 offers players a subscription to the old version
Many users noticed that pre-orders for GTA 6 had opened, but along with that they discovered a surprise: placing an order comes bundled with a free month of GTA+ — a subscription to GTA Online with auto-renewal at $8 a month. In other words, when buying the new game, users get an additional service based on the old one thrown in as a bonus.
At first glance, there's nothing unusual here, and this is a common practice for many products. However, the problem turns up in the details that Rockstar isn't in a hurry to spell out: GTA Online in its current form is built on GTA 5, and whether an equivalent product will appear for GTA 6, which comes out on November 19, is still unknown. So, a person pre-orders the new game, gets a free month of the old subscription as a gift, and the moment they activate the code, ends up on auto-renewal. Some players didn't sort out the terms right away — pre-orders were placed in a rush, in the middle of the hype around the release, without reading the fine print on auto-renewal.
The scheme of signing people up for a paid service through a free trial period, banking on the customer forgetting to cancel before the charge, is a trick, regulators have long been familiar with, and in recent years far larger companies have already gotten burned by similar issues. In September 2025, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle an FTC lawsuit — this turned out to be the record fine in the agency's history over “dark patterns”: the company was accused of deliberately hiding the button to cancel Prime, while the auto-renewal terms were shown only when scrolling down the page on mobile devices.
It's worth noting that Rockstar formally isn't violating anything: activating the subscription requires the user's explicit consent, and there's legally nothing to find fault with yet. However, other market participants thought exactly the same way, and the large holding company Genesis Tech built its entire business on this. But the situation for that group of companies is currently up in the air, and that same FTC has started taking subscription products more seriously, paying attention not only to the monetization model but also to the services themselves and their actual market “necessity” and quality.
Against this backdrop, the story of free month of GTA+ built into the pre-order of the most anticipated game of the decade looks more serious, illustrating how the industry monetizes players' attention. Incidentally, this is exactly why getting subscriptions is somewhat difficult for some merchants. They're considered riskier by definition than one-time payments, since most transactions aren't processed manually but happen automatically, which is where room for manipulation appears. The moment a customer fails to read the terms once and subscribes to a service, they become tied and can't simply unsubscribe. For the merchant, this means chargeback and refund risks, though large companies have learned to dilute them by opening multiple accounts in different payment systems. But for the payment systems providing them services, situation is more complicated, since their own risk indicators are tracked separately and accumulate too.
Whether the fuss around subscriptions leads to any new restrictions and a drop in merchant interest in this model remains to be seen, but more oversight is probably what to expect.
That's how this week turned out — despite vacation season, fintech never sleeps, and so Monoup keeps a constant watch on announcements, events, and changes to keep our readers informed.
