Hungary has enacted a sweeping crypto law effective July 1, criminalizing “unauthorized” trading with penalties of up to 5 years for individuals and 8 for service providers.

With no implementation guidelines, Revolut has suspended crypto services, putting 500,000 Hungarians at risk.

Hungary has introduced a strict new regulatory and criminal law framework for crypto-asset trading that significantly tightens conditions for both service providers and users, building on its 2024 “Crypto Act” and the EU MiCA regime. The core change, effective 1 July 2025, is that exchanging crypto-assets for fiat or for other crypto-assets is only lawful if the transaction is validated by a specially authorized crypto-asset validation service provider (a “Validator”) supervised by the Supervisory Authority for Regulatory Affairs (SARA). These Validators must perform detailed due diligence – including identifying wallet owners, assessing risk profiles, checking the origin of funds and screening against databases – and then issue a compliance certificate; without this certificate, the transaction is invalid at law. In parallel, Hungary has amended its Criminal Code to create new offences connected to unauthorized crypto-asset exchange services. It is now a criminal offence both to provide exchange services without the required validation and to use such unauthorized services, where the exchanged amount reaches or exceeds HUF 5 million (roughly in the tens of thousands of euros). Legal analyses describe this as a unique national layer on top of MiCA that effectively criminalizes unvalidated exchanges and exposes both platforms and customers to potential criminal liability. However, key implementing rules are missing: no Validators have yet been authorized, and SARA has not issued the detailed decree that will govern how validation works in practice, leaving market participants in significant legal uncertainty. This uncertainty has prompted a highly cautious response from the industry. Legal and compliance advisories emphasize that, from July 2025, virtual asset service providers may no longer operate in Hungary without an EU MiCA-compliant license and, in practice, a path to validation. Because the law makes transactions conducted without validation both invalid and potentially criminal, and because there are still no operational Validators or technical guidelines, many service providers are reassessing or suspending Hungarian crypto offerings to avoid legal and criminal risk. Against this backdrop, concerns have been raised about the impact on large retail user bases of international fintech platforms operating in Hungary, and about how ordinary users can safely continue digital asset activity until the implementing framework is clarified and functioning.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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