Revolut wins Gibraltar crypto licence for global expansion

The Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) has authorised Revolut Global Digital Assets Limited (RGDAL) as a distributed ledger technology provider, Revolut said in an announcement published on 19 October 2026. Distributed ledger technology, or DLT, is the shared-record technology that underpins most cryptoassets. HM Government of Gibraltar, which published its own statement the same day, identified Part 7 of Gibraltar's Financial Services Act as the basis for the permission and welcomed it alongside Revolut's full resumption of customer onboarding in Gibraltar.

Revolut described the authorisation as the platform for further international crypto expansion. As of 20 October 2026, it had not said which countries or regions it intends to serve through RGDAL, or when any service would go live; it said those details would be announced later.

For UK customers, the immediate answer is that nothing has been announced that changes who provides their crypto services. Revolut's own UK documentation identifies Revolut Ltd as the provider of its UK crypto services, registered under the UK Money Laundering Regulations with firm reference number 900562. The Gibraltar announcement does not establish a change to that provider, nor to the protections that apply to UK crypto holdings — protections that Revolut's terms already describe as narrow, as set out below.

What the Gibraltar permission covers

Gibraltar's government says the permission covers four regulated DLT activities:

• transmitting virtual asset orders to third parties;
• executing virtual asset orders using the firm's own virtual assets or money;
• virtual asset custody, meaning holding assets on a customer's behalf;
• virtual asset staking, where assets are committed to help operate a blockchain network in return for rewards.

The search-indexed GFSC register entry for RGDAL corroborates the same set of permissions. A permission is not a product launch: it establishes what the firm may do under Gibraltar law.

Two things about the register entry are worth stating plainly. FinTechPulse could not open the full GFSC register page for RGDAL, only the search-indexed extract, so the exact legal effective date of the authorisation and any conditions attached to it are not established. The extract also carries a generic asterisk warning that permissions may be restricted or suspended; that marker does not establish either unrestricted permission or any suspension in this case.

The register extract also shows that RGDAL was incorporated in Gibraltar on 27 June 2024, with incorporation number 124553. Revolut has called the entity newly established; on the register evidence, it is more accurately described as newly authorised rather than newly incorporated.

Which entity does what

Revolut's announcement sets out separate entities for separate regions. The table below records how Revolut itself describes them.

MiCA is an EU regime and does not apply in the UK. Gibraltar is likewise a separate jurisdiction from the UK: a GFSC permission is not a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) registration, and it does not in itself establish permission to operate in other countries. Revolut's announcement does not claim that it does.

That distinction matters because coverage has already run ahead of the announcement. Payment Expert, reporting on 19 October 2026, framed the Gibraltar permission as supporting expansion across Europe and key European markets. Revolut's own announcement separately identifies RDAEL as its EEA provider. On the evidence available, a European rollout through RGDAL is not established.

UK protections and risks

UK registration under the Money Laundering Regulations is an anti-money-laundering registration. The FCA's published explanation of the cryptoasset AML and counter-terrorist-financing regime, last updated 12 February 2026, is explicit that registration does not by itself give customers access to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

Revolut's documentation says the same thing about its own service. Its help pages state that crypto holdings have no FSCS protection. Its UK cryptocurrency terms state that these services are not FSCS-protected and that complaints about them are unlikely to fall within the FOS's jurisdiction.

Revolut's general crypto risk summary is framed more widely, noting that the FOS may consider complaints against an FCA-regulated firm. The two statements differ in scope rather than flatly contradicting each other, and the service-specific qualification in the crypto terms is the one that applies here. Neither should be read as an absolute rule that every possible complaint is excluded, or that any is covered.

The product risks are unchanged by any of this. Revolut's risk summary warns that customers can lose their entire investment, and that staking can reduce the assets staked through slashing, a penalty applied by the blockchain network. Regulatory authorisation of a provider does not reduce the market risk of the assets held through it. The FSCS and FOS position above applies to Revolut's crypto services and should not be read across to its separate banking or payment services.

Scale, as the company reports it

In the 19 October 2026 announcement, Revolut reported more than 80 million retail customers worldwide and more than 16 million crypto users. These are company-reported global figures. The announcement does not define an active crypto user, give a measurement period, or break the numbers down for the UK, and they have not been independently audited for this report.

What to watch

The gaps are specific and they are the ones that will determine whether the Gibraltar entity matters to anyone outside Gibraltar: which markets Revolut names, when services open in them, which local permissions it holds in each, and whether the exact effective date and any conditions on the GFSC permission are published. A market-specific announcement from Revolut, matched against the relevant local regulator's register, would settle most of it.

Readers who want the primary detail rather than a summary of it can check the GFSC register entry for Revolut Global Digital Assets Limited (opens in a new tab), Revolut's UK cryptocurrency terms (opens in a new tab) and crypto risk summary (opens in a new tab), and the FCA's page on the cryptoassets AML and CTF regime (opens in a new tab).