2023-04-19 15:31:04
European Union politicians discussed the community’s landmark MiCa regulation before Thursday’s vote. Legislators say new cryptocurrency regulations in the region will end the industry’s Wild West era and restore confidence following last year’s high-profile crashes.
The Markets in Crypto Assets, MiCA regulation for short, will be tabled in the European Parliament tomorrow, which is an important milestone in the implementation of the proposal into law.
Before the vote, the members of parliament discussed the essential points of the package in the meeting room today, and several people welcomed it.
Spanish MEP Ernest Urtasun, who was one of the representatives tasked with drafting the legislation, said that MiCA “for the unregulated world of crypto-assets, it means the end of the Wild West era”.
“For more than a decade, the lack of regulation has caused huge losses to many novice investors and provided a safe haven for fraudsters and international criminal syndicates. MiCA is an important and necessary first step towards bringing the crypto industry under regulatory oversight” he added.
After more than two and a half years of discussion, it seems that the regulation will come to an end on April 20. MiCA focuses on crypto asset providers and the obligations they will have to report.
According to Stefan Berger, German MEP representative, the main proponent of the decree, MiCa “puts the EU at the forefront of the token economy and restores the trust destroyed by the FTX case”.
Several other representatives speaking for MiCA also mentioned the catastrophic collapse of FTX. Financial Commissioner Mairead McGuinness even said that if FTX had been under EU jurisdiction, “many of his practices would not have been allowed”, and pointed to rules within MiCA that require companies to disclose conflicts of interest and not use client funds.
Chris MacManus is an Irish MEP said:
“I am not interested in creating or facilitating the use of a market for crypto assets. In the worst case, they are used by pyramid schemes and criminal gangs to launder money, deceive working people, and waste enormous amounts of energy aimlessly.”
Meanwhile, Dutch MP Paul Tang compared cryptos to an episode in his country’s history: the tulip craze of 1637, an early financial bubble.
“The bubble burst, savers, speculators and investors lay in ruins” – He told. “The similarities with crypto are striking. No one knows what they can be used for…” However, he acknowledged that tulips have now become a part of Dutch culture and said that perhaps cryptocurrencies might one day achieve the same.
However, German MEP Gunnar Beck put it this way: “The EU criminalizes decentralized finance and its users by requiring more transactions to be reported to the competent authorities. The EU is creating a full financial supervisory state”.
Many members of parliament spoke regarding the need to adopt rules that do not hold the EU back in terms of technological development.
“Europe missed the innovation train when it came to the Internet” said Lídia Pereira from Portugal. “Now it is not enough to just catch the train, we have to become the driving force of this new era”.
If the parliament accepts the MiCA tomorrow, the European Council must give it final approval in May. Its stablecoin rules go into effect in July next year, but providers will have more time to catch up with some other requirements that won’t come into effect until January 2025.
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