MiCA Crypto Alliance Submits Its Response to the MiCA Review
The MiCA Crypto Alliance has submitted its response to the European Commission’s targeted consultation on the review of MiCA.
The response draws on our experience of implementing MiCA in practice, particularly in asset classification research, MiCA white papers and environmental disclosures. These are our key recommendations.
White papers
We recommend clarifying the modification, monitoring and withdrawal obligations, shortening the 20-working-day notification period, and providing more effective paths for white papers to be reused across offers, admissions, and multiple persons drawing up the white papers.
The response also documents inconsistent implementation and enforcement. This includes NCAs not enforcing inline XBRL (iXBRL) and environmental information requirements since those requirements came into force, which leads to regulatory arbitrage, as well as extensive copy-pasting, white papers absent from the register of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), speculative white paper notifications using the ESMA register as a private advertising board, and violations of the non-approval requirement of Article 8(3).
Asset-referenced tokens
The ART framework regulates multi-currency stablecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation at the same time. We identify this double personality as one of the main factors behind the lack of success of the ART regime, and we recommend distinguishing the two.
We also call for clarification that wrapped tokens, bridged tokens and liquid staking tokens should not be treated as ARTs subject to stablecoin regulation. Their economic and technical functions are fundamentally different.
Environmental disclosures
The framework appears precise because of its many decimal places. Yet the most important consensus mechanism questions are materially mismeasured.
Bitcoin’s emissions are exaggerated. Widely used methodologies assume renewable Bitcoin mining does not exist and do not investigate it, which defeats the purpose of the system. In addition, we recommend improvements to the XBRL taxonomy and energy-mix fields, better transaction-intensity metrics, more useful contextual indicators and consistent enforcement of existing requirements.
Issuerless stablecoins
Recital 22 recognises that where a crypto-asset has no identifiable issuer, MiCA’s issuer-facing requirements should not apply. This principle should apply consistently across Titles II, III and IV. Legal uncertainty is caused by the selective application of the exemption to Title II, but not to Titles III and IV under some interpretations. We argue for a more coherent approach.
The complete response contains further recommendations. Juan Ignacio Ibañez, our Executive Director, has also written a dedicated article on the topic, "Problems with the MiCA Environmental Disclosure Regime", available in full here.
