EU Agrees New Rules To Rein In ‘Wild West’ Crypto Industry

By: Legal Insights (Herbert Smith Freehills)

The European Parliament and Council reached a preliminary political agreement on the Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) on 6 June 2022. This latest development follows a series of other steps in the EU’s drive to become a first mover on crypto regulation. These include:

• Political agreement in other pieces of legislation such as the Funds Transfer Regulation on 29 June 2022, the Digital Operational Resilience Act earlier in March and crypto-related amendments to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) and other product legislation in May.
• The planned expansion of scope of anti-money laundering requirements to align the Fifth Money Laundering Directive with MiCA and capture additional cryptoassets.
• The DLT Pilot Regulation, which came into force in June.

This note summarises our understanding of where MiCA has landed following political agreement. As the agreed text of MiCA is not yet publicly available, some of the detail of the agreement may not be reflected below…

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