Juan Ignacio Ibañez on MiCA, the UK and USA’s Emerging Regimes, and Why There's No Offshore Shortcut
Juan Ignacio Ibañez, Executive Director of the MiCA Crypto Alliance, joined BeInCrypto's Expert Legal and Regulatory Council and sat down with Phil Haunhorst to unpack how MiCA compares with the emerging US and UK regimes, and why startups still struggle with the cost of getting licensed in the EU. The conversation, recorded on 28 August 2026, ranged across jurisdictional comparison, the "offshore" question, and the grey areas MiCA has yet to resolve.
MiCA, the US and the UK: More Alike Than Different
Juan set out MiCA's two core pillars: the regulation of crypto assets themselves (including stablecoins, or asset-referenced tokens) and of crypto-asset service providers (CASPs). He argued the same basic proposition holds well beyond the EU. The US regulates stablecoins and service providers too, even where the line between securities and commodities exchanges falls differently there. The UK, he said, is closer still:
"In the UK, there's an upcoming regime with regulation of specifically trading platforms. And while there's not a separate regulation for the assets, much of the regulation for the assets is quite similar, because at the point of admission to trading, you also need to file a disclosure, which is similar to the MiCA white paper."
He pointed out that the UK's qualifying cryptoasset disclosure documents are, in effect, UK white papers, and that the US has something similar coming. Good regulatory ideas, in his view, tend to spread regardless of jurisdiction.
The Real Barrier is Cost, Not the Rulebook
Where MiCA does stand apart, Juan argued, is in its cumulative cost. Startups face what he called a jumpstart problem: a licence requires staff, staff require funding, and funding is hard to raise without a licence in hand. He was equally clear that trying to sidestep the EU market from abroad is not a workaround:
"You cannot go to a small island and try to serve the EU market from there. That, in essence, is not going to work."
Non-EU providers, he said, generally cannot serve EU customers in regulated categories, and enforcement on this point is tightening, not loosening.
Where the Lines Still Blur
Juan also flagged where MiCA's boundaries remain contested, chiefly liquid staking tokens, which sit uneasily between "crypto asset" and "financial instrument" and lack clear regulatory guidance. He was candid that regulators themselves are still building expertise, and that some companies have faced licensing questions regulators could have raised months earlier.
Key Takeaways
MiCA's core approach, in Juan's telling, is not an EU anomaly. It is fast becoming an international template, with the UK and US converging on similar service-provider and disclosure requirements. But the Alliance's work training and coordinating the industry around the regime's remaining grey areas, from liquid staking tokens to cross-border enforcement, remains far from finished.
Watch the full conversation on BeInCrypto's podcast.
