Ireland Company Formation for Crypto: the LTD and the Licence

The LTD is the company, not the licence

Ireland is an attractive EU base for a crypto business for reasons that have nothing to do with crypto: it is English-speaking, common-law, inside the EU single market, and home to a deep bench of fintech, funds, and technology firms. A crypto setup in Ireland opens with one step: forming an LTD.

The company step is quick and cheap. The licence is neither. And the distance between those two facts is the single most useful thing to understand before starting — because in Ireland the gap is unusually wide.

What an LTD is

An LTD is a private company limited by shares, the standard company type under the Irish Companies Act 2014. It is the entity almost every crypto business uses to incorporate in Ireland.

Its defining features:

• No statutory minimum share capital — founders choose a nominal issued capital, commonly between €1 and €100
• Limited liability — shareholders’ exposure is limited to their shareholding
• Registered through the Companies Registration Office (CRO)
• A fast, low-cost incorporation

That is the easy part of an Irish setup, and it is genuinely easy. The trouble starts only when the ease of the company step is read as a signal about the project as a whole.

Quick company, deliberate regulator

Here is the Ireland-specific point. In some jurisdictions the company and the licence are both quick, or both slow. In Ireland they are sharply different. The LTD is fast. The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) — the regulator that grants the MiCA CASP authorisation — is known for a thorough, deliberate authorisation process.

That is not a criticism of the CBI. A demanding regulator produces a credible licence. But it does mean a founder cannot extrapolate from the incorporation. The LTD landing in a week tells you nothing about how long, or how much work, the CASP authorisation will take. Plan the two on separate clocks.

The capital that matters is the licensing capital

The LTD’s nominal share capital — that €1-€100 — is company-formation capital. It exists because Irish law sets no minimum, and it is not the capital a regulated crypto activity requires.

A MiCA CASP licence carries its own prudential floor: under Annex IV, an own-funds requirement of €50,000, €125,000, or €150,000 by CASP class, and the firm must hold the higher of that floor or a quarter of its fixed overheads.

Figure	What it is
€1-€100	LTD nominal issued share capital — the company-formation step
€50,000 / €125,000 / €150,000	MiCA CASP own-funds floor — by class, under Annex IV

Who authorises the regulated activity

The Central Bank of Ireland grants the CASP authorisation and supervises the firm afterwards. For how that process runs in practice, see our Ireland CBI CASP practitioner guide.

A complete Irish crypto setup is two projects, in order:

1. Form the LTD — the corporate step, via the CRO. Fast and cheap.
2. Obtain the CASP authorisation — the regulatory step, via the Central Bank of Ireland. This carries the Annex IV capital, the governance, the AML framework, and the substance — and the deliberate timeline.

Working with counsel on an Irish setup

The diagnostic for counsel: ask them to scope the CASP class, the licensing capital, and a realistic CBI timeline first — and to present the LTD formation as the quick corporate step it is. Counsel that leads with how fast an LTD can be incorporated, without setting expectations on the Central Bank’s deliberate process, has answered the easy question and left the hard one unspoken. For how the licence works, see the crypto licensing pillar guide and the CASP capital explainer. The firms in our index with Irish experience are listed below.