What Could Change in the EU Crypto Rules

The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, has applied across the European Union since December 2024 and was meant to be the final word: a single rulebook for issuers and service providers that replaces the patchwork of national regimes. Less than two years on, the European Commission has reopened it. A targeted consultation on the review of MiCA has been running since May 20, 2026, and anyone who wants to respond has until September 30, 2026.

For you as an investor in Germany, this is more than an administrative notice out of Brussels. The questionnaire asks whether the interest ban on stablecoins should fall, whether staking gets rules of its own, whether crypto lending slips into scope, and whether trading platforms will find it easier or harder to give you access to liquidity outside the EU. These are the dials that decide which products a MiCA-regulated crypto exchange will even be allowed to offer you in two years.

One point up front, because summaries tend to lose it: not a single one of these changes has been decided. The Commission is gathering opinions. This piece sorts out what the document actually says, how binding it is, and what timetable realistically sits behind it.

The MiCA review by the numbers: 86 questions, four sections, one questionnaire

The consultation document comes from the Commission’s Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union and is dated May 20, 2026. It runs to 86 numbered questions, many of them with sub-questions and rating scales from 1 to 5. The Commission explicitly asks for evidence: set things out clearly, with data, concrete examples and legal references wherever possible.

Only what arrives through the online questionnaire is counted. The document says so plainly: only responses submitted through the questionnaire feed into the summary report. An email to the relevant unit address is there for queries, but it does not replace a response.

The four parts of the document

The consultation follows the architecture of MiCA itself:

• Part 1 – scope and definitions (Title II): what counts as a crypto-asset under the regulation at all, how the white paper regime works, and how the marketing rules apply.
• Part 2 – asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens (Titles III and IV): by far the longest section, covering supervisory requirements, reserves, classification as “significant”, redemption rights and the interest ban.
• Part 3 – crypto-asset service providers (Titles V and VI): the service catalogue, own funds, multi-function groups, reporting duties and the interplay with DORA and the revised Payment Services Directive.
• Part 4 – beyond today’s scope: decentralised finance, staking, crypto lending and borrowing, and non-fungible tokens.

A subordinate clause in the introduction gives away the political direction. The Commission wants to use the opportunity to establish whether administrative burdens arising from MiCA and its implementing measures can be “simplified, reduced or removed altogether”. In the same breath it restates the principle of technological neutrality, under which regulation should not push market participants towards any particular technology.

Articles 140 and 142 MiCA: the legal mandate behind the consultation

The review is not a spontaneous idea. MiCA wrote its own revision into the text. Article 140 requires the Commission to report on how the regulation is being applied; Article 142 covers market developments that were not captured when it was adopted. That is precisely what the consultation document invokes.

The second point explains why Part 4 raises topics that do not appear anywhere in the 2023 MiCA text. For Article 140, the Commission also brings in the European Banking Authority and the markets watchdog ESMA.

The wording on the consultation page itself is what matters for context: the report may, “where justified”, be accompanied by a new legislative proposal amending and supplementing the regulation. A proposal is therefore possible, but not promised. Reading the consultation as a settled reform stretches it too far.

Two deadlines in circulation: the document says August 31, the Commission page says September 30

This is worth a close look, because both dates come from the sameed May 20, 2026, asks for responses through the online questionnaire “by August 31, 2026 at the latest”. The Commission’s consultation page, by contrast, carries a note about an extension at the top, and the key facts list the deadline as September 30, 2026 at 23:59 CEST. The status there reads “open”, with May 20, 2026 recorded as the opening date

The later date on the web page is the one that governs; the PDF reflects the position at publication. The practical consequence: analyses from early summer 2026 uniformly cite August 31. Anyone relying on such a summary is carrying a date in their head that has since moved by a month.

The Commission describes its target audience narrowly: representatives of the digital asset industry, meaning crypto-asset service providers and issuers, alongside authorities such as national or European supervisors, central banks and finance ministries. A targeted consultation is therefore aimed at a specialist audience. On the same page the Commission also points to a related public consultation addressing a wider circle. As a retail investor you forfeit nothing enforceable by letting September 30 pass. What this text is about is a preview of the rules you will be trading under later on.

MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges compared

Part 1: drawing the line between MiCA and MiFID for tokenised financial instruments

MiCA recognises three categories: asset-referenced tokens (ARTs), e-money tokens (EMTs) and all other crypto-assets. Anything that qualifies as a financial instrument falls under classic securities law, with MiFID, MiFIR, the Market Abuse Regulation and the Prospectus Regulation. Right at the start, the consultation asks the fundamental question of whether this split should stay, or whether every asset recorded on a blockchain belongs under MiCA.

The Commission also asks which categories are hardest to classify in practice, naming hybrid tokens, wrapped assets, tokenised fund units, tokenised money market instruments, governance tokens, synthetic positions and assets marketed as NFTs but issued in series.

For you, this boundary question has a very concrete core: the classification decides what level of protection applies to tokenised equities and similar products, which several platforms in the European Economic Area now offer. Under securities law, prospectus requirements and investor protection rules apply that MiCA does not have in this form.

The interest ban in Articles 40 and 50: Question 20 puts the most important stablecoin rule in play

This passage is the reason the consultation is of interest to retail investors at all. MiCA prohibits issuers, offerors and service providers from granting interest or any interest-like remuneration on stablecoins. The ban sits in Article 40 for asset-referenced tokens and in Article 50 for e-money tokens.

Question 20 asks, in substance: should this ban be amended? Two options are offered per token type, namely keeping the ban or permitting interest, either outright or under defined conditions. Anyone ticking “permit” is asked to give reasons.

What this means for your portfolio

As long as the ban holds, a euro or dollar stablecoin issued in the EU is purely a means of payment and settlement with no running yield. Returns on stablecoin balances arise today outside the issuer, through lending programmes or investment strategies, each with its own risks and its own tax treatment. If the ban fell, interest-bearing stablecoins could become a product competing directly with instant-access savings accounts and money market funds. That is exactly the competitive point the Commission raises in the question: the standing of EU-issued stablecoins against yield-bearing alternatives from other jurisdictions.

We broke down what the supervisory framework for these tokens looks like today, and which firms in Europe actually hold an authorisation, in the MiCA register of stablecoin issuers.

Reserves, minimum ratios of 30 and 60 percent and the question of a central bank account

The reserve section is more technical, but it decides how stable a stablecoin is when it matters. The Commission asks whether the liquidity and reserve regime for asset-referenced tokens should be loosened, kept as is or tightened. What comes up here are the reserve-holding obligations, the prescribed minimum shares of 30 and 60 percent respectively, audit and custody.

For e-money tokens issued by e-money institutions, the question is whether the 30 to 60 percent share held in bank deposits is appropriate. Going further, the consultation explores three building blocks familiar from banking law: whether such issuers may place their reserves directly with a central bank, whether they need a resolution regime of their own, and whether liquidity assistance should be available to them in an emergency.

The practical link is simple: the closer the reserve sits to central bank money, the lower the risk that a bank in difficulty feeds through to the redemption claim.

Global stablecoins and the multi-issuance model: what would remain in the EU in a run

The geopolitically trickiest section deals with tokens that circulate in several jurisdictions at once and are issued there by different entities, even though they are technically the same token. The Commission puts a whole series of risks up for assessment, among them run risk with depletion of the reserves held in the EU, an unbalanced distribution of reserves across countries, restrictions on cross-border transfers in a crisis, supervisory arbitrage via the interchangeability of the units, and third countries with weaker supervisory standards.

On the other side, it tests appetite for safeguards. Among the measures discussed are preferential redemption rights for tokens actually circulating in the EU, limiting redemption to customers of EU-authorised service providers, different crisis rights for retail and institutional holders, dedicated liquidity buffers in the EU, and near real-time reporting of reserves and liquidity.

Two further questions show how open the field is: whether MiCA should introduce an equivalence regime for global stablecoins that relies, under conditions, on foreign legal frameworks, and whether the current rule of treating every e-money token denominated in an EU currency as offered in the EU is holding back the international role of the euro.

Not a single authorised ART: what Question 12 says about the market for asset-referenced tokens

One of the few hard factual statements in the document sits in Question 12. After almost two years of application, not a single asset-referenced token has been authorised under MiCA in the EU. The Commission asks whether that is down to a lack of market interest or to the authorisation and regulatory requirements themselves, and puts both factors on a rating scale.

Next comes the question of what such tokens are supposed to be for from a consumer and investor point of view at all, as an investment or as a means of payment and exchange. That is a remarkably open way to put it for an authority that created the category itself.

Part 3: an appropriateness test for service providers and access to liquidity outside the EU

In the section on service providers, the Commission asks which services should be added to the MiCA catalogue and what requirements would then have to apply. One proposal affects you directly: an appropriateness test for the reception and transmission of orders, execution, and placing of crypto-assets. You know it from the securities business as a check on knowledge and experience before your first trade in a product type.

For groups that combine crypto services with other regulated or unregulated activities, the question is whether today’s governance is sufficient or whether group reporting, supervisory colleges or consolidated supervision are needed.

The most important question for market structure is whether MiCA adequately enables EU consumers and investors to reach trading and liquidity venues outside the Union, or restricts that access excessively. Anyone who has found a token thinly traded or entirely unavailable at European providers knows the practical side of this. In addition, the consultation asks whether the revision of the Payment Services Directive has removed the uncertainty over which crypto services also count as payment services.

Part 4 and DeFi: which criteria should decide what counts as fully decentralised

MiCA carves out services provided in a fully decentralised manner without any intermediary. What that means precisely is still not in the law. The consultation offers a set of assessment criteria for the first time and asks which features indicate that an application is in fact not fully decentralised and therefore falls within scope.

Those named are an identifiable intermediary, control through administrator keys, a concentration of voting rights in governance, custody of user assets, code that is not openor company

For protocols that survive this test, the Commission asks in Question 62 whether the risks should be caught indirectly through regulated service providers. The options on the table are due diligence duties owed by service providers towards the protocols they connect their customers to, liability for certain incidents, and warning and disclosure obligations.

Crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers compared

Certification of smart contracts: the structurally largest proposal in the document

The furthest-reaching idea is a certification scheme for decentralised applications. The document defines certification as evidence that an application is robust against smart contract vulnerabilities and operational risks and works the way it publicly describes.

Almost everything about it is open: whether such a scheme should cover all MiCA services, whether private or public bodies would certify, whether only significant protocols would be captured, measured for instance by value locked, and whether regulated service providers would be barred altogether from connecting their customers to uncertified protocols. Should that last variant prevail, it would be the change users feel most acutely when moving from a regulated exchange into decentralised applications.

Staking, crypto lending and NFTs: three areas with no rules of their own in MiCA

Question 66 asks whether today’s approach of not regulating staking services separately is appropriate and, if not, what requirements should apply to providers. At present, staking offers are mainly caught by the general custody and organisational duties. We took apart which providers therefore need an authorisation, and how your income is treated in Germany, in our piece on staking under MiCA.

Question 67 turns to crypto lending and borrowing. The Commission wants to know whether this area should be regulated and which elements such regulation would have to rest on. For non-fungible tokens the question is put more simply: does the state of the NFT market justify regulating service providers? Under Article 2(3) MiCA, unique and non-fungible crypto-assets have so far been left out.

Why these three points belong together

Staking, lending and trading in collectibles are the areas where European investors most often operate outside the regulated perimeter today. If they come into scope, investor protection rises and, at the same time, part of today’s offering disappears from the European market. The Commission addresses this trade-off itself in the introduction, where it sets the level of protection alongside the international competitiveness of the EU.

Prediction markets, perpetual futures and tokenised deposits: the gaps since 2023

Section 4.4 of the document names two developments that did not exist on this scale when MiCA was adopted: blockchain-based prediction markets and the trading volume in perpetual futures on crypto-assets. The Commission asks whether prediction markets bring opportunities or risks for EU consumers and whether they belong under MiFID or under MiCA. It puts the same classification question for perpetual futures.

With tokenised deposits, meaning digital representations of balances at commercial banks, the issue is the interplay with banking supervision law and with deposit guarantee schemes. For savers this carries the widest implications, because it is where the line runs between a bank balance and a crypto instrument.

What the MiCA review means for you as an investor in Germany

A few sober conclusions can be drawn from the list of questions. First: none of it changes your legal position today. The regulation applies unchanged, and your provider continues to operate under the rules it was authorised under.

Second: the direction of the debate is visibly split in two. On scope, the tendency is towards widening, because DeFi, staking, lending, prediction markets and perpetual futures are all being examined. On the duties of already regulated providers, by contrast, simplification is on the table, explicitly under the heading of cutting red tape.

Third: two points are tangible for your portfolio. The interest ban decides whether the EU will ever see interest-bearing stablecoins from regulated issuers. And the question of access to liquidity outside the Union helps decide how broad the trading offer at European platforms turns out to be in future.

How to recognise sound reporting on this topic

Because plenty of articles on MiCA reform will appear in the coming weeks, one simple check helps. Watch whether a piece distinguishes between a question in the consultation document and a decision by the Commission. Formulations such as “the EU will allow interest on stablecoins in future” are unsupported at this stage. What is supported is only that the Commission is asking about the option. A second check is the deadline: anyone still citing August 31, 2026 is working from the original document.

Timetable: from questionnaire to report to a possible legislative proposal

The road ahead follows from the regulation and from the usual course of business in Brussels. The response phase runs until September 30, 2026. The Commission then evaluates the feedback and publishes the responses cleared for publication. Out of that material comes the report under Articles 140 and 142, with the EBA and ESMA involved.

Only once that report exists and the Commission sees a need to act does a legislative proposal follow, if at all. It would then have to pass through the ordinary procedure with Parliament and Council, and only after that do transition periods start. Between today’s consultation and an amended rule lies a realistic path of several years. For your investment decisions this year, the consultation is an early indicator, not an instruction.

All the information in this text comes from the European Commission’s consultation document and the key facts published alongside it; the framing of the 86 questions and the four sections matches the analysis by the law firm Freshfields of June 5, 2026, which does, however, still cite the old deadline.

MiCA review: what to take away

1. Separate the question from the decision. Everything you read over the coming months about loosened stablecoin interest or regulated DeFi protocols is, for now, a position in a questionnaire. So keep assessing your running income under the law as it stands today, for instance in the comparison of staking platforms.
2. Look at where your interest comes from today. Because no interest is permitted on stablecoins themselves, every return arises from an additional transaction with its own counterparty risk. Anyone lending out balances should know the terms and the collateral; our lending comparison shows where the models differ.
3. Keep your records clean. If the framework changes, reporting routes and documentation duties change with it. A complete record of your purchases, sales and income costs little effort today and saves a great deal later; you will find the tools for it in the comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

(As of August 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primaryI

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Source: cryptoticker.io