People Radar: Oliver Stauber – The Lawyer Steering KuCoin’s MiCA Landing in Vienna

Charlene Lensburg
Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:17:22 +0000
People Radar, ticker, BitPanda, KuCoin, Oliver Stauber

Viennese lawyer Oliver Stauber is now CEO of KuCoin EU and one of the central figures of Austria’s emerging “MiCA hub.” A long-time crypto lawyer, former Chief Legal Officer of Bitpanda, FinTech adviser to the Austrian government and vice president of the Digital Assets Association Austria (DAAA), he sits exactly at the intersection of politics, regulation and high-risk exchanges like KuCoin.

Key Facts

Name: Oliver Stauber

Current role: CEO, KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH (Vienna) (Source: LinkedIn).

Background: Attorney at Stadler Völkel; former CLO & MD at Bitpanda; board roles at Blocktrade and other token projects Stadler & Partner, Brutkasten).

Policy roles: Member of the former FinTech-Beirat at the Federal Ministry of Finance; founding board member and now VP of DAAA

Other functions: Founder and chairman of vidaflex, an ÖGB-backed initiative for self-employed workers (Source: Vidaflex).

Read our KuCoin Compliance Report 2025 here.

Narrative Profile

Stauber is well-connected with the Austrian Social-democratic party. He built his reputation in Vienna as an early “crypto lawyer” with Stadler Völkel, focusing on ICOs, tokenisation and capital-markets regulation (Source: Stadler & Partner). In 2020 he switched from advisor to operator by joining Bitpanda as Chief Legal Officer, shaping the legal and compliance architecture of Austria’s best-known crypto unicorn and representing it at conferences and policy panels (Source: brutkasten).

Alongside his corporate roles, Stauber positioned himself as a bridge between startups, regulators and labour interests: he co-founded the DAAA to lobby on digital-asset regulation and created vidaflex with trade union ÖGB as a service platform for one-person businesses (Sources: Extrajournal, DAAA, Brutkasten)

Regulatory / MiCA Footprint

Through the Finance Ministry’s FinTech advisory board and DAAA, Stauber has been involved in consultations around EU financial-market rules, including the rollout of MiCA and related regimes (MiFID, DORA, GDPR) as they hit the crypto sector (Source: Arena Digitale). Public statements emphasise “constructive dialogue” with supervisors like the FMA and the need to turn Europe’s rulebook into a functioning market (Source: LinkedIn).

Importance for KuCoin & the “Austrian MiCA Hub”

For KuCoin – a group with a heavy enforcement history in the U.S., Canada and multiple EU states – Stauber is strategically central. As CEO of KuCoin EU and managing director of the Austrian entities, he is the face that connects a controversial global exchange to Vienna’s regulator-friendly narrative of a “secure, MiCA-compliant” hub (Source: KuCoin, CryptoRank).

His network spans Bitpanda alumni, DAAA board members, Austrian policy circles and European crypto projects, making him a key gatekeeper for how KuCoin positions itself toward regulators, institutions and the local ecosystem.

Call for Information

FinTelegram invites insiders, former colleagues, regulators and industry partners to share additional information on Oliver Stauber’s role in KuCoin’s MiCA application, his interactions with the FMA, and his wider influence on Austrian crypto policy. Information can be provided confidentially via Whistle42.