ECB Wants a Staking Ban for Stablecoins Under MiCA
The ECB and national central banks want MiCA to also ban indirect yield through staking, lending, and borrowing. They also want stricter liquidity requirements for stablecoin reserves.
Key Takeaways
- The ECB and national central banks want to expand MiCA's ban on compensation for stablecoins to staking, lending, and borrowing.
- The ESCB wants to replace fixed bank deposit minimums with liquidity requirements for reserves with one- and five-business-day terms.
- These are still proposals; the current 30% and 60% rules remain in place until lawmakers decide otherwise.
The European Central Bank and the national central banks of the EU want to tighten the MiCA rules for stablecoins. In a response to a consultation, they propose expanding the ban on compensation to staking, lending, and borrowing, and replacing the fixed bank deposit minimums with maturity-based liquidity requirements. These are not yet adopted rules.
Compensation Should Apply More Broadly
According to the European System of Central Banks, the umbrella group for the ECB and the EU's 27 national central banks, the existing ban should not only cover direct interest. Indirect yield through lending, borrowing, staking, or other structures around a stablecoin should also fall under it.
The central banks worry that parties outside the existing MiCA services could build products that effectively make stablecoins work like savings products. The response says electronic money is meant for payments, not as a way to save. For European crypto users, that matters because stablecoins are often also used in DeFi and other yield products in practice.
New Requirements for Reserves
The second change is about the reserves backing stablecoins. Right now, issuers of tokens that track an official currency must hold at least 30% of the referenced amount as bank deposits. For significant tokens, that is 60%. The ESCB wants to remove those fixed minimums.
Instead, there would be liquidity rules that look at how quickly reserve assets can be accessed. For significant tokens, at least 40% of reserves would need to be available within one business day and 60% within five business days. For non-significant tokens, the thresholds would be 20% and 30%.
The central banks say this better fits situations where many holders want to redeem at the same time. They also point to existing standards from the European Banking Authority, which were partly shaped by outflows during earlier crypto-related stress events. The debate lines up with earlier concerns about MiCA reserve requirements, which had already led to tensions around Tether in Europe.
No New Law Yet
Important: these are still proposals in a consultation response. The current 30% and 60% rules therefore remain in place until the European lawmakers decide otherwise. The ESCB also mentions risks around so-called multi-issuance models, where global stablecoin companies treat EU tokens as interchangeable with tokens outside the EU.
For the European crypto market, this shows that regulators want to define stablecoins more tightly as a payment method. That could be especially relevant for issuers, crypto exchanges, and companies that use stablecoins in lending or staking products, because the room for yield on these tokens may be narrowed further.
