The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, has published its first consultation package under the Markets in CryptoAssets Regulation and invites comments from stakeholders by 20 September 2023. In this first of three consultation packages, ESMA is seeking input on proposed rules for cryptoasset service providers (CASPs), in particular related to their authorisation, identification and management of conflicts of interests and also how CASPs should address complaints.
In addition, ESMA aims to gather more insight on respondents’ current and planned activities, as a fact-finding exercise to better understand the EU crypto-asset markets and their future development. These questions relate to elements such as the expected turnover of the respondents, the number of white papers they plan to publish and the use of on-chain vs offchain trading. The input to this part of the consultation will remain confidential and will serve to calibrate certain proposals to be inserted in the second and third consultation package.
Verena Ross, Chair of ESMA, said: “This first consultation package is an important milestone for ESMA in the implementation of the MiCA framework. It translates our ambition to set high regulatory standards in the EU for crypto-asset related activities into concrete requirements. We are determined to ensure entities involved in crypto-asset related activities understand that the EU is not a place for forum-shopping. We also want to remind consumers that, even with the implementation of MiCA, there will be no such thing as a safe crypto-asset.”
In parallel to this consultation, ESMA will continue working on its remaining mandates with the objective to publish a second consultation package in October 2023.
Next steps
ESMA will consider the feedback received to this consultation and expect to publish a final report and submit the draft technical standards to the European Commission for endorsement by 30 June 2024 at the latest.
