ESMA Consults on Crypto Rules

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, has published its first consultation package under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and is inviting comments from stakeholders by 20 September 2023.

In this first of three consultation packages, ESMA says it is seeking input on proposed rules for crypto-asset service providers, in particular related to their authorisation, identification and management of conflicts of interests and also how they should address complaints.

In addition, ESMA says it aims to gather more insight on respondents’ current and planned activities, as a fact-finding exercise to better understand the EU crypto-asset markets and their future development. “These questions relate to elements such as the expected turnover of the respondents, the number of white papers they plan to publish and the use of on-chain vs off-chain trading,” the European regulator says. It adds the input to this part of the consultation will remain confidential and will serve to calibrate certain proposals to be inserted in the second and third consultation package.

“This first consultation package is an important milestone for ESMA in the implementation of the MiCA framework,” says Verena Ross, chair of ESMA. “It translates our ambition to set high regulatory standards in the EU for crypto-asset related activities into concrete requirements.

“We are determined to ensure entities involved in crypto-asset related activities understand that the EU is not a place for forum-shopping,” she continues. “We also want to remind consumers that, even with the implementation of MiCA, there will be no such thing as a safe crypto-asset.”

In parallel to this consultation, ESMA says it will continue working on its remaining mandates with the objective to publish a second consultation package in October 2023.