New committee voting date for European Parliament’s crypto law is next week

The EU’s Markets in Digital Assets, or MiCA, regulation is scheduled for a key committee vote next week following delays last week.

On March 7, Stefan Berger, who heads the European Parliament’s ECON Committee and is the rapporteur for MiCA, announced that the committee will vote on its finalized version of the bill on March 14. 

At the end of February, a provision that resembled a ban on proof-of-work tokens — most notably, Bitcoin — stirred up a controversy that ended up delaying the bill’s votes, which Berger had set for February 28. The coalition that had assembled to pass the bill through the committee and on to Parliament fell apart as a result of increased scrutiny from the industry and public.

The Greens, in particular, had been a key vote in favor of the bill but only if it maintained the PoW ban. The fact that Berger is rescheduling the bill suggests that he has successfully reassembled a coalition willing to move MiCA forward.

There are still, a few elements of concern for the industry in the most recent available edits of the current draft bill. Among other things, its proposed regulations for “asset-referenced tokens,” which most will know as “stablecoins,” are particularly stringent.

“To ensure the proper supervision and monitoring of offers to the public of asset-referenced tokens, issuers of asset-referenced tokens should have a registered office in the Union,” the regulation reads, which could well put decentralized stablecoins like DAI on notice. 

However, even after the coming votes in parliament, the bill will still have to go through trilogue debates including the European Commission, which put together the initial proposal, and the European Council, which passed its own version of MiCA months ago. Those competing visions will face consolidation before becoming law.