Still, MiCA has achieved many of its original goals, according to Hansen. There are around 20 euro-denominated stablecoins that have been approved by the regime, with adoption supported by their formal regulation.
However, it is not perfect, he added, pointing to reserve rules that require minimum bank deposits. Attention is also shifting beyond domestic regulation to global oversight. The next phase of policymaking could focus on allowing tokens regulated in one jurisdiction to circulate in another through mutual recognition arrangements.
“We could take advantage of the global, Internet-native nature of these assets rather than fragmenting their circulation through locally fragmented rulebooks,” he said.
The EU may have had something of a first-mover disadvantage in terms of regulating cryptoassets, as there was no framework in large markets such as the US or Hong Kong to work with as there is now.
Fortress Europe
Sebastian Barling, partner for financial institutions regulatory at Skadden, compared the EU’s approach to building a “fortress”.
“The consultation is clearly a serious review to ensure that the European regime adapts internationally and remains competitive,” he told CoinDesk.
Barling and Legler explored the Commission’s decisive shift towards evaluating a third country equivalence regime and managing cross-border multi-issue structures in a recent article. They highlighted that while MiCA currently lacks a mechanism to defer foreign frameworks, an equivalence regime could change the market by enabling mutual recognition and allowing globally circulating stablecoins to be listed on EU exchanges.
