EU Postpones Final Vote on MiCA Crypto Rules Again Until April 2023
Author:The ultimate decision on the European Union's highly anticipated crypto regulations, termed the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulations, has been delayed until April 2023. This is the second time the vote has been put off, having previously been delayed from November 2022 to February 2023.
The Block reported that the most recent postponement is the result of a technical difficulty that stopped the 400-page official document from being translated into the 24 official languages of the EU. Legal papers such as the MiCA, drafted in English, need to follow EU principles and be issued in each of the 24 authorized language versions of the union.
The initial postponement in November 2022 leading to the final voting being delayed until February was also due to problems with translation. This deferment means that European financial regulators must wait a longer time period before they can formulate the implementation rules of the law. After MiCA has gained accepted validation, the financial regulators will have 12 to 18 months to create the applicable technical regulations.
In October 2022, the European parliamentary committee eventually passed the MiCA regulation, two years after it was proposed in September 2020. Despite increasing calls for the legislation to be adopted, most notably due to the FTX-induced crypto crisis, the process was twice delayed.
Stefan Berger, a member of the European Parliament's economics committee, has labeled the failure of FTX as one of the 'Lehman Brothers incidents' that need to be forestalled, while pushing for regulatory frameworks such as MiCA.
European policymakers are working with MiCA to create a unified regulation in order to establish consistent procedures and guidelines for crypto assets across the EU, so that crypto assets that are not subject to existing EU laws can have certainty about the legality.
Regulations on cryptocurrency will set out guidelines for how digital asset tokens are run, organized, and administered. They will also provide rules surrounding transparency and disclosures around the issuance and trading of crypto assets.