Crypto at Estonian Providers Halved in a Year. Then the Statistics Stopped

Eesti Pank's last four crypto releases tell one story in their headlines. In June 2025 the bank reported that clients held crypto assets worth 1.8 billion euros through Estonian service providers. In March 2026 client crypto assets had fallen by more than a third in a quarter, which the bank put down to falling prices. In June 2026 the providers' own assets were 42% lower than a year earlier.

On 15 September 2026 came the fourth: client crypto assets had fallen by more than half in a year. In the same release the bank said it could not publish statistics for the third quarter, because too few firms hold the licence that replaced the old one. The next release depends on whether, and how many, new providers enter the market.

The bank's statistics tables give the amounts behind those headlines. Client crypto assets, not counting clients' fiat money, stood at 2,620 million euros at the end of 2024, the highest of the ten quarters published. They were 1,918 million at the end of June 2025 and 808 million at the end of June 2026: 58% less in a year and 69% below the peak.

The headlines are the bank's own figures for the firms it covered, the virtual currency service providers licensed by the Financial Intelligence Unit. They do not count crypto that Estonian residents hold on platforms abroad.

Almost all of the client assets belonged to clients outside Estonia. At the end of June 2026 residents held 3.5 million euros of the 889 million in client assets, against 94.6 million a year earlier.

Eesti Pank publishes statistics on crypto-asset service providers only when at least three firms report in each indicator and no single firm can be made out from the published figure, Andres Lauba, a statistician at Estonia's central bank, told Vultax on 12 October 2026. He wrote, in Estonian: "Currently, too few service providers have registered here as CASPs for that."

That explains the gap the bank announced on 15 September. The licence that let virtual currency service providers operate ran out on 30 June 2026, and too few firms have the new crypto-asset service provider licence for a figure to pass the bank's rules.

Lauba's answer does not give a date for publication to resume.

The three-firm threshold applies to each indicator separately, and a single firm must also not be identifiable within any indicator. Lauba said the same criteria apply to any more detailed statistics, naming breakdowns by crypto asset, by client, by client residency and turnover by service.

Three licence holders would therefore not guarantee that every breakdown can be published. Each indicator still needs three reporting firms, and none of them may be identifiable.

The earlier series covered virtual currency service providers, VASPs, licensed by Estonia's Financial Intelligence Unit. Those licences allowed firms to operate until 30 June 2026. From 1 July, Finantsinspektsioon, the financial supervisor, licenses and supervises crypto-asset service providers, CASPs.

The two groups of firms differ, so their business results cannot be compared as one continuous time series, Lauba said. He added his assumption that the larger participants have registered in other countries. That is an assumption, not a measured relocation, and Vultax has not used it to estimate any change in Estonia's crypto industry.

An unpublished quarter is not a zero. A chart of the series should keep the last published figures and mark the third quarter of 2026 as missing. Filling it with zero would claim a measurement Eesti Pank has not published.

When a CASP series appears, check which firms, indicators and methods it covers before comparing it with the VASP figures. Whether an indicator can be published and whether its group of firms matches the old one are two separate questions.

These statistics describe the service providers covered by Estonian licensing. They are not a count of every Estonian resident's crypto holdings or trading on platforms abroad.