The EU could be set to streamline its members’ crypto regulatory framework – after a crucial European Commission ruling.
Per IFC Review, which quotes European Commission’s press office, the Commission wants to have a set of proposals in place as early as the third quarter of 2020, but admitted that “there may be coronavirus-related delays.”
The media outlet says that the Commission has been in consultation with “experts around Europe” for the past year and has now drawn up what it terms a ”non-paper” with three key priorities.
Firstly, the EU’s governing body wants to create a legal definition for all cryptoassets, including fiat-pegged stablecoins and security tokens.
Next, the Commission wants to make amendments to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, a piece of EU legislation that regulates firms providing financial services.
The directive, known as MiFID II, lists assets it classes as financial instruments, such as (shares, bonds, derivatives, and more. The Commission would seek to add cryptoassets to this list.
And finally, the Commission wants to create a “regime” for “blockchain-based platforms” – most likely meaning that the EU will seek to create a binding set of regulatory measures for crypto exchanges, brokerages, and other crypto-powered enterprises.
IFC Review quotes the European BlockTech Federation chairman Bruno Schneider Le Saout, one of the architects of France’s crypto regulatory policies, as stating,
“We expect this legislation to be historic for Europe. These laws will support digital finance across the EU for many years to come. The new legislation will provide legal certainty, which is needed both for cryptoassets that are not covered by existing EU financial services legislation and for the application of distributed ledger technology in financial services and the tokenization of traditional financial instruments.”
