MiCA review consultation: the map
The MiCA review was filed as a 2027 problem. The Commission has just made it an August 2026 one.
On the table is a targeted consultation on the review of MiCA, and it is worth being precise about what kind of document it is. It is not a draft proposal, and it does not prejudge a final position. It is the Commission services asking, in writing and in detail, where MiCA is too narrow, where it is too strict, where it is too vague, and where the market has already moved past it. The answers that come back shape what a proposal would later contain. For a compliance team, a CASP, or an issuer, the questions are the clearest signal available of which parts of the regime are in play.
In short:
The consultation is directional. It questions MiCA's foundations, and it expressly does not commit the Commission to any outcome.
The deadline to respond is 31 August 2026, through the Commission's online questionnaire. Only responses filed there are counted.
Stablecoins are the centre of gravity. The largest part of the document concerns asset-referenced and e-money tokens, and it opens by noting that no asset-referenced token has been licensed in nearly two years of MiCA being in force.
The frontier questions reach activities MiCA deliberately left outside its scope: decentralised finance, staking, lending, NFTs, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and the private-law treatment of tokens.
This post maps the whole terrain. The rest of the series takes the highest-interest areas one at a time.
What this consultation is
Two provisions of MiCA require the Commission to look back at the regulation, and this consultation feeds both. Article 142 asks for a report on matters left outside MiCA's original scope. Article 140 asks for a broader report on how MiCA is being applied, with the full report due by 30 June 2027. Both reports can be accompanied by a legislative proposal where the Commission considers one appropriate. The consultation is how the Commission gathers the evidence for them, and it consults EBA and ESMA in parallel.
The practical details are simple. The window closes on 31 August 2026. Responses go through the online questionnaire on the consultation page, and the Commission has said that only responses filed there will be counted in the report summarising the replies. Questions about the process can be sent to fisma-mica-review@ec.europa.eu. Running through the whole document is a simplification theme: alongside each substantive area, the Commission asks what administrative burden could be reduced or removed without losing protection.
The perimeter question
The first part of the consultation reopens the boundary between MiCA and the rest of financial law. It asks directly whether crypto-assets that qualify as financial instruments should continue to sit under MiFID and its neighbours, or whether everything recorded and transacted on a distributed ledger that meets the definition of a crypto-asset should fall under MiCA. It then asks whether ESMA's classification guidance and the joint standardised classification test have actually reduced uncertainty in practice, and which cases remain hard to place: hybrid tokens, wrapped assets, tokenised fund interests, governance tokens, synthetic exposures, and assets marketed as NFTs but issued in series.
Stablecoins are the centre of gravity
The largest part of the document is about asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens, and the Commission does not hide where the pressure is. It states that close to two years in, no asset-referenced token has been licensed under MiCA, and asks whether that reflects weak market interest or the weight of the regime itself. From there it works through the prudential architecture: own funds, reserve composition, liquidity buffers, the deposit concentration limits, redemption rights, and the recovery and redemption plans issuers must hold. One question that will draw attention is whether the prohibition on paying interest, which applies to ARTs under Article 40 and to e-money tokens under Article 50, should be kept or relaxed.
Global stablecoins and EU autonomy
A separate set of questions treats stablecoins as a matter of economic sovereignty. The Commission asks whether MiCA should continue to permit multi-issuance models, where a global stablecoin is issued by linked entities across jurisdictions and made fungible across them. It lays out the risks it is weighing, including run risk and reserve depletion inside the EU during stress, restrictions on moving reserves across borders, and the difficulty of measuring how much of a token is actually held in the EU. It asks whether redemption rights should be limited to EU holders, and whether an equivalence regime for third-country stablecoins would help. It also asks whether the rule that every euro-denominated e-money token is treated as offered in the EU still makes sense, or whether it discourages the international use of the euro.
CASP proportionality
For crypto-asset service providers, the consultation is narrower in one respect: supervision sits in a separate package and is out of scope here. What remains is the question of whether the framework is proportionate and complete. The Commission asks whether the list of regulated services is adequate, whether the Level 1 and Level 2 rules are simple enough for firms of different sizes, whether DORA leaves any cybersecurity gaps, how the recently revised payment services rules interact with CASP activity, and whether MiCA unduly restricts EU access to non-EU liquidity. It also asks for evidence of non-EU providers serving EU clients without authorisation, and what tools supervisors would need to stop them.
The activities MiCA left out
The final part is the most open. On decentralised finance, the Commission explores an indirect model: how to tell when a protocol is not genuinely decentralised, and whether to reach truly decentralised activity through the access points, for example by requiring CASP due diligence before connecting a client to a protocol, or by certifying protocols and smart contracts. It asks whether staking should be regulated as more than an add-on to custody, and whether lending and borrowing of crypto-assets should be regulated at all. It asks whether NFT service providers should be brought into scope, given that NFTs sit outside MiCA under Article 2. And it singles out two developments that arrived after MiCA was written, prediction markets and perpetual futures, asking whether each belongs under MiFID or MiCA.
Tokenised deposits and legal certainty
The document closes on a layer beneath conduct regulation. It asks about tokenised deposits, the digital representation of commercial bank money on a ledger, and where they could be useful across payments and settlement. Then it raises the harder question that MiCA does not answer: whether holding or controlling a token amounts to ownership, or only to a claim on something held elsewhere. MiCA regulates issuers and offerors. It is silent on the property status of what they issue, which has been left to national law. The Commission asks whether EU law should increase certainty over issuance, transfer, collateral, custody, good-faith acquisition, and the treatment of tokens in insolvency, and it sets out concrete models for doing so, including a dedicated EU regime for the legal effect of ledger entries.
What the series will cover
This piece is the map. The areas above each carry enough detail to stand on their own, and the rest of the series will take them in turn: the stablecoin prudential architecture and what the absence of any licensed ART says about it; global stablecoins and multi-issuance under EU safeguards; the DeFi indirect-regulation model; tokenised deposits and the legal certainty questions underneath them; the MiCA and MiFID classification perimeter; the move in Title II from disclosure toward a substantive token-launch regime; the proposed expansion into staking, lending, NFTs, prediction markets and perpetual futures; and euro stablecoins as economic sovereignty.
For anyone with a position to protect or a problem they have been living with since December, the consultation is the cheapest hour of lobbying available before 31 August. The questions are already written. The only choice left is whether your answer is in the file the Commission reads.
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