EU delays vote on MiCA crypto regulation

It will still be a while before the groundbreaking MiCA crypto regulation draft is released.

It will still be a while before the groundbreaking MiCA crypto regulation draft is released. The vote in the plenary session has been postponed.

Meeting at the earliest February 2023

There is already consensus on the MiCA bill (Markets in Crypto Assets). But it will take at least until February for the text to gain democratic legitimacy. This, as a EU Parliament spokesperson told Coindesk has confirmed, because lawmakers will vote as early as February 2023. In fact, the groundbreaking crypto regulation was set to go on the Parliament’s agenda in December. The scope and complexity of the law are causing some delays. The sprawling regulation must be translated into all 24 official EU languages before a vote can take place.

Until now, MiCA has been approved in the responsible economic committee in the draft version by EP member Stefan Berger (CDU). The plenary session of the European Parliament and the governments of the EU member states still need to give permission to make the regulation legally binding.

MiCA is not only viewed within the EU as a trend-setting draft regulation for handling Bitcoin and Co. The industry also looks to Europe for international leadership. Europe is seen as a key market for the crypto sector; a fifth of the global crypto economy comes from Europe.

MiCA: ban on proof-of-work does not win a majority

The MiCA debate has also sparked controversy because a bloc of left-leaning parties campaigned hard for an EU-wide ban on proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. That proposal, however, did not make it into the final bill.

In July, BTC-ECHO spoke with Rasmus Andresen, the Green Party member who was the driving force behind the Bitcoin ban.

Aside from the failed attempt to ban PoW coins, stablecoin issuers will be required to hold reserves in the future—the backdrop to this being the collapse of the Terra Luna ecosystem.