The short answer
Crypto is legal in Florida, and businesses that hold your money are licensed. Federally they must register with FinCEN as money services businesses; in Florida they need a money transmitter licence under Chapter 560, Part II from the Office of Financial Regulation. CS/HB 273 (2022) confirmed that the requirement attaches to intermediaries holding customer funds. HB 505 caps and polices Bitcoin ATMs from 1 January 2027, and SB 314 made Florida the first state with a payment stablecoin framework.
$100k
minimum net worth for a Florida money transmitter licence
$2M
top of the surety bond range, scaled to projected volume
1 Jan 2027
HB 505 kiosk rules take effect statewide
37–0
Senate vote that made Florida the first state to pass a stablecoin bill
Two layers, and why both matter
Crypto regulation in Miami operates on two levels simultaneously, and conflating them causes most of the confusion in this area.
The federal layer is anti-money-laundering law. Under the Bank Secrecy Act, any business that transmits money or monetary value on behalf of others is a money services business and must register with FinCEN, maintain a written AML programme, appoint a compliance officer, train staff, keep records and file suspicious activity reports. FinCEN's guidance has for years treated businesses dealing in convertible virtual currency as falling inside this framework. This layer is about detecting illicit finance, not about protecting you as a consumer.
The state layer is consumer and prudential protection. Florida licenses money transmitters under Chapter 560 and requires them to be solvent, bonded and supervised. This is the layer that determines whether a company that loses your money had capital behind it, and whether a regulator can act.
A properly run crypto business serving Florida sits inside both. When you check whether a platform is legitimate, you are really asking two separate questions — and there are two separate registries to answer them.
Chapter 560, and what a Florida licence actually costs
Part II of Chapter 560 of the Florida Statutes requires licensure of anyone who, for compensation, sells or issues payment instruments or engages in the activity of a money transmitter. The Florida Office of Financial Regulation administers it, with implementing rules in Chapter 69V-560 of the Florida Administrative Code.
The bar is meaningful, which is the point. It is high enough to exclude the undercapitalised and low enough not to reserve the market to banks.
Licence requirements Florida money transmitter licence, Chapter 560 Part II
| Requirement | Threshold | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum net worth | $100,000 | Solvency floor |
| Additional per location | $50,000 | Scales with footprint |
| Net worth cap | $500,000 | Ceiling on the above |
| Surety bond | $50,000 – $2,000,000 | ≈2% of projected volume |
| FinCEN MSB registration | Required first | Federal AML baseline |
| AML programme | In place before issue | Not a promise — a prerequisite |
| Background checks | Required | Fit and proper persons |
Figures reflect the statutory framework as administered by the OFR. Applicants should work from current OFR guidance and the rule text rather than any summary, including this one.
For a consumer, the practical value of all that is simple. The question "is this company licensed in Florida?" has a checkable, binary answer, and a licensed company has posted a bond and demonstrated capital. That is a genuinely different proposition from an offshore platform with a slick app and no verifiable registration anywhere.
HB 273: the intermediary test that changed everything
On 12 May 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed CS/HB 273, which took effect on 1 January 2023. It did two things that continue to shape the Florida market.
First, it wrote a definition of "virtual currency" into Chapter 560 — a medium of exchange in electronic or digital format that is not currency. Before that, applying a money transmission statute written for wire transfers to a blockchain involved a certain amount of interpretive optimism on all sides.
Second, and more consequentially, it clarified that a money transmitter licence is required only where a person acts as an intermediary holding customer funds. That single word does an enormous amount of work. A custodial exchange holding your dollars and your coins is an intermediary and needs a licence. A non-custodial wallet developer, a self-hosted software provider, or a protocol that never touches customer funds is not.
This is why Florida became measurably friendlier than most states to build in, and it is a large part of the explanation for the industry migration to Miami. It also gives you a clean heuristic as a user: if they hold your money, they need a licence, and you should check. If they never hold your money, the licence question is the wrong question and you should be asking about code quality and key management instead.
HB 505: the kiosk act, and why it is unusual
Signed on 26 June 2026, HB 505 is the most consumer-protective crypto statute Florida has passed, and one clause in it is genuinely unusual in American consumer-finance law.
The context was hard data rather than ideology. Florida logged 1,213 kiosk-related complaints and roughly $32.8 million in kiosk-related losses in 2025. Nationally the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 13,460 crypto ATM and kiosk complaints with $389 million in losses that year — a 58% increase in losses and 23% increase in complaints in twelve months — with victims aged 60 and over accounting for $257.4 million across 6,188 complaints.
Registration
Operators must register with the OFR
Virtual currency kiosk businesses must register with the Florida Office of Financial Regulation before operating. This requirement takes effect 1 March 2027, two months after the rest of the act.
Daily caps
$2,000 for new customers, $10,000 for everyone else
A hard statutory ceiling: $2,000 per day for customers with fewer than seven days of transaction history with that operator, $10,000 per day thereafter. No tier upgrades past the cap.
Disclosure
On-screen fraud warnings and printed receipts
Machines must display clear fraud warnings and offer the customer the option of a printed receipt on completion. The receipt is not a courtesy — it is the evidence that supports a later claim.
Refunds
Full refund within 72 hours on a first transaction
Fraud victims are entitled to a full refund on their first kiosk transaction, payable within 72 hours, where the fraud is reported with proof inside 60 days. This shifts the cost of scams from victims onto operators.
Effective
Most provisions from 1 January 2027
The act largely takes effect at the start of 2027, with the registration requirement following on 1 March 2027. Until then, the current tiered-verification regime continues to apply.
The refund clause is the part worth dwelling on. Most consumer-protection law in this space imposes disclosure duties and leaves losses where they fall. HB 505 instead makes first-transaction scam losses an operator cost. That changes incentives rather than just paperwork: an operator facing refund liability has a direct financial reason to interrupt a transaction that looks wrong, rather than to process it and collect the fee.
It also arrives into an industry already under severe pressure. Bitcoin Depot, formerly North America's largest operator with more than 9,000 machines, filed for Chapter 11 on 18 May 2026 and deactivated its entire fleet, having blamed exactly this kind of state compliance burden. Our Miami ATM operator audit covers who is left and what it means for buyers.
SB 314: America's first state stablecoin framework
On 6 March 2026 the Florida Senate passed SB 314 by 37 votes to nil, making Florida the first US state to establish a regulatory framework specifically for payment stablecoins. It works alongside House Bill 175 and is effective from October 2026, with licensing through the Office of Financial Regulation.
The substantive requirements are conservative in the right ways. Issuers must hold 100% reserve backing in US Treasuries or insured deposits. KYC and transaction reporting apply above $10,000. Paying interest on a stablecoin balance is prohibited without federal authorisation, which keeps the product a payment instrument rather than an unregistered deposit or security. And oversight transfers to federal regulators once an issuer crosses $10 billion in issuance. The whole framework is explicitly aligned with the federal GENIUS Act.
Why this matters practically to someone in Miami: a fully reserved, state-supervised stablecoin is the closest thing to a dollar that moves on a blockchain. It reduces the number of times you need to touch the bank wire system at all, which is where most crypto transactions actually fail — see crypto banking in Miami. It also makes stablecoin-denominated products more sensible to hold, which is already visible in card rewards shifting from volatile tokens to stablecoins.
The 37–0 vote is worth noting too. Digital-asset regulation is rarely unanimous anywhere. It suggests a settled state-level consensus in Florida that this activity should be supervised rather than suppressed, which is a more useful signal for the next five years than any single provision in the bill.
The state bitcoin reserve proposal
Filed on 7 January 2026 by Representative John Snyder, House Bill 1039 would establish a Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Fund held outside the state treasury, authorising Florida's chief financial officer to manage crypto investments under defined risk controls, with independent audits and an advisory committee.
It revives ideas from 2025 legislation that was withdrawn, which had proposed allowing up to 10% of certain state funds to be allocated to bitcoin. Notably, HB 1039 does not mandate a minimum allocation — it grants the CFO discretion over whether and when to deploy anything at all, which is a considerably more cautious design than the headlines suggest.
This should be read alongside the state's broader posture. In 2023 DeSantis signed legislation barring central bank digital currencies from recognition under Florida's commercial code — sceptical of federally issued digital money while remaining open to decentralised alternatives. Florida also charges no state personal income tax, which means no state capital gains tax on crypto disposals; see crypto tax in Miami.
Whether a state reserve is good policy is a genuinely contested question and not one we take a position on. For a resident, the practical relevance is narrower: a state whose legislature is debating how to hold bitcoin is unlikely to make it difficult for you to hold it too.
How to verify any crypto company yourself, in ninety seconds
All of the above is only useful if you actually check. Three free public registries, no account needed, and between them they answer every licensing question that matters.
Verification Three registries, three different questions
| Registry | Answers | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| FinCEN MSB searchFederal | Is it federally registered? | Search the legal entity name, not the brand. Registration means it has told FinCEN it operates as an MSB — a baseline, not an endorsement. |
| NMLS Consumer AccessState licences | Which states licence it? | Search by NMLS ID if the company publishes one. Good platforms do — for example NMLS ID 1804170. Check that Florida appears in the licence list. |
| Florida OFR lookupState regulator | Is it licensed here? | The authoritative Florida answer, and the place any enforcement history would appear. Worth checking even when NMLS looks fine. |
A company absent from all three is not necessarily illegal — a genuinely non-custodial service may need no licence at all under the HB 273 intermediary test. But if it holds your money and appears nowhere, that is your answer.
Glossary
- Money transmitter
- A business that receives money or monetary value from a customer for transmission to another party. In Florida this activity is licensed under Chapter 560, Part II by the Office of Financial Regulation.
- MSB
- Money services business — the federal category that requires registration with FinCEN, an anti-money-laundering programme, recordkeeping and suspicious activity reporting under the Bank Secrecy Act.
- Virtual currency
- Defined in Florida law by CS/HB 273 (2022) as a medium of exchange in electronic or digital format that is not currency. The definition determined which businesses fall inside Chapter 560.
- Intermediary
- The pivotal concept in Florida’s framework. A licence is required where a person acts as an intermediary holding customer funds — which captures custodial exchanges and exempts many non-custodial models.
- Virtual currency kiosk
- The statutory term used by HB 505 (2026) for what the market calls a Bitcoin ATM or BTM. Operators must register with the OFR and comply with caps, disclosures and refund duties.
- Payment stablecoin
- A digital asset designed to maintain a stable value against a reference currency, used for payment. Regulated in Florida from October 2026 under SB 314, requiring 100% reserve backing.
The bottom line
A state that decided to supervise rather than suppressRead as a whole, Florida's framework is unusually coherent. Chapter 560 sets a real capital and bonding bar for anyone holding customer money. HB 273 drew a clean line around custody so that non-custodial builders are not caught by a statute written for wire transfers. HB 505 targets the one segment — kiosks — where consumer harm was demonstrably concentrated. SB 314 brought stablecoins inside a supervised perimeter before the federal government finished doing so.
For a resident of Miami-Dade, the takeaway is practical rather than political. The protections exist, they are checkable, and using them costs you ninety seconds. The people who lose money in this state are, with very few exceptions, the people who never looked.