The MiCA review has reopened Europe’s crypto rulebook barely two years after it started applying, and the industry now has until 30 September 2026 to tell the Commission what is broken. The executive launched its targeted consultation on 20 May, then pushed the original 31 August deadline back by a month on 29 June, a concession that suggests responses were arriving slowly or arriving alarmed.
Eighty-six questions is not a light-touch exercise. The document ranges across stablecoin governance, the ban on paying interest on e-money tokens, staking services, crypto lending, decentralised finance and the supervisory split between national regulators and the European Securities and Markets Authority. Each of those topics carries a constituency with a strong view and a lobbying budget.
Reviewing a regulation this early is unusual but not irrational. MiCA was drafted between 2020 and 2022, negotiated against the collapse of Terra and FTX, and finalised before dollar-denominated stablecoins reached the scale they occupy today. The text that emerged regulates issuers and service providers competently and says almost nothing about the parts of the market that grew fastest afterwards.
Two questions dominate the file. The first is the interest ban. MiCA prohibits issuers from remunerating holders of e-money tokens, a rule designed to stop stablecoins from becoming shadow deposits and draining funding from banks. Issuers argue the ban simply pushes yield offshore, where holders earn returns from platforms outside European supervision. Banks argue that removing it would let a lightly capitalised issuer compete for retail savings with none of the prudential apparatus.
The second is supervisory architecture. MiCA licenses firms nationally and passports them across the single market, which means a Maltese or Lithuanian authorisation grants access to 450 million consumers. ESMA has pressed for direct supervision of the largest crypto-asset service providers, arguing that authorisation standards vary too widely for mutual trust. National regulators, unsurprisingly, prefer the arrangement they administer.
Staking and lending sit in a genuine gap. Neither activity is clearly inside MiCA nor clearly inside existing financial services law, so firms have built products in a space where supervisors improvise. A firm offering staking rewards in Frankfurt may face a different reading of the same regulation in Dublin. That is precisely the fragmentation MiCA was written to end.
DeFi is harder still. The regulation applies to identifiable intermediaries, and protocols governed by token holders present no obvious entity to license. The consultation asks how the Union should treat arrangements without a licensable actor, which is less a technical question than a constitutional one about what regulation means when nobody is in charge.
The timeline matters for anyone building in Europe. A consultation closing in September feeds a Commission proposal in 2027 at the earliest, followed by Parliament and Council negotiations that historically run eighteen to thirty months. Firms authorised under the current regime should plan for compliance stability through 2028 and uncertainty after that.
Sceptics will note the pattern. Europe legislates early, discovers the market moved, and reopens the file while implementation is still bedding in. Firms that spent millions building MiCA compliance now face a rewrite before the first supervisory cycle has completed, and regulatory churn carries its own cost. The defence is that a rulebook nobody revises becomes a rulebook nobody follows.
The consultation documents sit on the Commission’s finance portal, and the deadline extension was confirmed in late June. What arrives by 30 September will shape whether the MiCA review trims the framework or expands it.
