The MiCA review consultation closes on Monday 31 August, and the responses will shape whether Europe’s crypto rulebook gets a light touch or a second edition. The Commission opened the exercise on 20 May, barely eighteen months after the regime became fully applicable.
That timing is the story. Firms spent 2024 and 2025 building compliance functions, applying for authorisation and rewriting white papers against a text that had taken years to negotiate. Reopening the file now signals the Commission does not think the framework has settled, and supervisors privately agree.
The consultation document asks three questions that matter more than the rest. First, where the boundary sits between assets governed by MiCA and assets governed by MiFID and the wider financial rulebook. Tokenised deposits and tokenised funds sit awkwardly across that line, and the Commission floats the idea that anything recorded on a distributed ledger should in principle fall inside MiCA.
Second, the prudential treatment of asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens. Capital, reserve composition, redemption rights and crisis management all reopen. Stablecoin issuers have argued the current reserve rules force them into low-yielding bank deposits at a scale that concentrates risk rather than diffusing it. Central bankers read the same rules as barely adequate.
Third, the activities MiCA never covered. Decentralised finance, staking, lending and prediction markets grew while the text was in negotiation. The regulation captures service providers with identifiable legal persons. It has little to say about protocols that claim to have none.
Running underneath all of this is the simplification agenda. The Commission frames the review partly as a competitiveness exercise, and industry has read that as an invitation to ask for less. Some of those asks are reasonable. White paper requirements duplicate disclosure that already exists elsewhere, and the authorisation process has produced genuine bottlenecks in smaller national regulators.
Other asks are harder to justify. Loosening reserve or redemption rules for euro-denominated stablecoins while dollar tokens dominate European trading volumes would be an odd way to build monetary resilience. The European Central Bank has been explicit that multi-issuance arrangements with non-EU affiliates create redemption exposure the current text handles imperfectly.
There is also a supervisory question the consultation touches only lightly. MiCA authorises firms nationally and passports them across the Union. Several member states have processed applications far faster than others, and the gap invites the forum shopping that the regulation was meant to end. Whether the answer is central supervision through ESMA is a political fight the Commission has not yet picked.
What happens next is slow. The Commission owes a report to the Parliament and Council by 30 June 2027, and any legislative proposal would follow that. Firms authorised under the current text therefore face at least two more years of operating under rules everyone agrees are provisional. That is its own kind of regulatory cost, and it is the one nobody consulted on.
