Lithuania UAB Company Formation for a Crypto Business

A UAB is the company, not the licence

Lithuania is the busiest crypto-licensing jurisdiction in the EU, so a great many crypto setups begin the same way: “form a Lithuanian company.” In practice that means forming a UAB — and the UAB is genuinely one of the easy parts of a Lithuanian setup. It is cheap, it is quick, and it is well understood.

It is also, with tiring regularity, mistaken for the licence. Forming a UAB does not authorise a single regulated crypto-asset service. The company is the vehicle; the licence is a separate question. This article is about the vehicle — and about keeping the two straight.

What a UAB is

A UAB — uždaroji akcinė bendrovė — is Lithuania’s private limited liability company, the standard closed-shareholding company under the Lithuanian Law on Companies. It is the entity type almost every crypto business uses when it incorporates in Lithuania.

Its headline features:

• Minimum share capital of €1,000 — modest, and payable in cash
• Limited liability — shareholders’ exposure is limited to their contribution
• Registered through the Centre of Registers (Registrų centras), Lithuania’s company registry
• Practitioner-reported formation in roughly one to three weeks for a clean file

None of that is hard. A UAB is a fast, inexpensive, well-trodden incorporation. The trouble starts only when the €1,000 figure is read as the cost of the business rather than the cost of the company.

The capital that matters is the licensing capital

Here is the distinction that decides whether a budget is realistic. The UAB’s €1,000 is company-formation capital. It is not the capital a regulated crypto activity requires.

A MiCA CASP licence carries its own prudential floor. Under MiCA’s Annex IV, the own-funds requirement is €50,000, €125,000, or €150,000 depending on the CASP class — the set of crypto-asset services the firm intends to provide. And the firm must hold the higher of that floor or a quarter of its fixed overheads.

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

The two numbers are not alternatives and not the same line item. A founder who sees “€1,000 to start a Lithuanian crypto company” and budgets accordingly has under-scoped the project by a wide margin. The licensing capital — and the substance around it — is the real number.

Why founders pick Lithuania for the company

The UAB is attractive for the same reasons Lithuania is attractive as a base. It is an EU member state, so a CASP authorised there can passport across the Union. The incorporation process is digitised and quick. And Lithuania has a deep local ecosystem — lawyers, auditors, AML officers, and banking contacts who handle crypto work daily, because so many crypto firms are already there.

That ecosystem is a genuine advantage. It means the supporting cast a CASP needs already exists in the jurisdiction. But it is an advantage for the licensing project — not a property of the UAB itself. The UAB is just the standard EU private company; the value is in where it sits.

The Bank of Lithuania, and what it authorises

Crypto authorisation in Lithuania is the job of the Bank of Lithuania — the central bank, acting as the country’s integrated financial supervisor. It grants the MiCA CASP authorisation, and it supervises the firm afterwards.

So a complete Lithuanian crypto setup is two projects, in order:

1. Form the UAB — the corporate step, via the Centre of Registers. Fast and cheap.
2. Obtain the CASP authorisation — the regulatory step, via the Bank of Lithuania. This carries the Annex IV capital, the governance, the AML framework, and the substance.

Step one does not shorten step two. They are sequential, and the second is the one that takes the time, the capital, and the work.

Working with counsel on a Lithuanian setup

The diagnostic for counsel: ask them to scope the CASP class and the licensing capital first, and to present the UAB formation as what it is — a quick corporate step inside a much larger project. Counsel that leads with “we’ll register a UAB for €1,000” without putting the MiCA authorisation, the Annex IV floor, and the substance in the same sentence has described one cheap step and let you assume it was the whole thing. For how the licence works, see the crypto licensing pillar guide, the CASP capital explainer, and the Lithuania CASP guide. The firms in our index with Lithuanian experience are listed below.