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Council of the EU adopts new rules on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA)

by EUROCROWD on 16.05.2023

EUROCROWD welcomes the final text of the EU Regulation on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA), as agreed by the European Parliament and the European Council. With the adoption inter-institutional agreement by the Council on 16 May 2023, the proposal for a regulation on markets in crypto-assets is now finally on its way to the President of the European Parliament and the Presidency of Council of the European Union, who will sign the agreement. The text will then be published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

MiCA aims to protect investors by increasing transparency and implementing a comprehensive framework for issuers and service providers, including compliance with the anti-money laundering rules. The new rules cover issuers of utility tokens, asset-referenced tokens and so-called ‘stablecoins’. It also covers service providers such as trading venues and wallets holding crypto assets.

The finally agreed MiCA text is available here

The European Commission presented the MiCA proposal in September 2020 as part of the larger Digital Finance Package hoped to develop a European approach that fosters technological development and ensures financial stability and consumer protection. In addition to the MiCA proposal, the package contains a digital finance strategy, a Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), that covers crypto-asset service providers, and a proposal on distributed ledger technology (DLT) pilot regime for wholesale uses. These will help complement the crowdfunding sector now implementing its services under the ECSP Regulation.

This closes a gap in existing EU legislation by ensuring that the current legal framework does not pose obstacles to the use of new digital financial instruments and, at the same time, ensures that such new technologies and products fall within the scope of financial regulation and operational risk management arrangements of firms active in the EU. As a result, the digital transition has been and will be a top priority for the EU over the next decade and a priority area for investment under its recovery plan.

The EC's work on crowdfunding, starting in 2013 based in parts on the intervention of EUROCROWD, resulted in the 2018 proposal for what is now ECSP, pre-dates the ECs Capital Market Union (2015) and its subsequent Fintech Action Plan (2018) as well as the Digital Finance Package (2020), was at the start of the EU’s digital strategy. The development of digital finance should be based on European values and sound regulation of risks. Crowdfunding service providers can now exploit a strong regulatory framework supporting the sector's development covering digital assets, ledgers, and operational resilience, designed to enable public offerings of tradeable securities and lending to small and medium-sized businesses across Europe.

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