Valletta: Crypto firms licensed in Malta and across the single market have until 30 September 2026 to tell the European Commission what is wrong with Europe’s crypto rulebook, as the targeted consultation feeding the MiCA review enters its final days following an extension from the original August cut-off.
The Commission’s financial services department opened the exercise on 20 May 2026, barely eighteen months after the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation became fully applicable. Officials describe it as a fitness check rather than a rewrite, but the questionnaire ranges widely enough that a rewrite is plainly on the table.
Respondents answer questions on scope and definitions, the rules governing stablecoin issuers, the authorisation regime for crypto-asset service providers, decentralised finance, staking services and the legal status of non-fungible tokens. Several items probe the boundary with existing securities law, asking whether tokens that qualify as financial instruments should stay under MiFID or whether everything recorded on a distributed ledger should fall inside MiCA instead.
That boundary question carries more weight than its technical phrasing suggests. Firms have spent two years and considerable legal fees deciding which side of the line their products sit on, and national supervisors have not always reached the same answer. A single perimeter would simplify compliance; it would also hand the crypto regime authority over instruments that regulators have policed as securities for decades.
The Commission is not consulting out of curiosity. Articles 140 and 142 of the regulation oblige it to report to the European Parliament and the Council on how MiCA is working and on developments in crypto-asset markets. The consultation page states plainly that the report may, if warranted, arrive with a legislative proposal amending the regulation.
Unit B4 of the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union runs the exercise, which targets a specialist audience rather than the general public. The Commission names crypto-asset issuers, service providers, national and European supervisors, central banks and finance ministries as its intended respondents.
Market conditions have shifted since MiCA was drafted. Institutional money moved into digital assets at a pace the original text did not anticipate, dollar-denominated stablecoins grew into a genuine payments channel inside the euro area, and the international regulatory picture changed considerably, not least in the United States. Each of those developments tests a framework designed around a smaller and more retail-facing market.
Supervision is the quieter fight. MiCA left authorisation with national authorities, which produced a licensing race in which some jurisdictions moved faster than others. The Commission’s broader savings and investments union agenda pushes toward centralised supervision of market infrastructure, and the answers gathered here will help decide whether crypto joins that list. The Commission set out its reasoning when it launched the consultation in May.
Nothing changes on 1 October. The Commission will read the submissions, publish a summary in the usual way and fold the findings into a report due to co-legislators by 30 June 2027. Any legislative proposal would follow after that, which means firms trading under MiCA today should expect the current rules to govern them well into 2028. The submissions filed this month will shape what eventually replaces them.
