Less than eighteen months after MiCA made the European Union the first major jurisdiction with a comprehensive crypto rulebook, Brussels is already reopening it. And the industry that once praised the framework’s first-mover advantage is now warning that parts of it risk leaving Europe behind.
The European Commission has opened public comments on revisions to MiCA across four consultation areas that will shape digital asset regulation in Europe through 2028 and beyond. The window opened in May 2026 and runs through August 31, covering the regulatory scope for non-asset-referenced tokens, the requirements for electronic money tokens (EMT) and asset-referenced tokens (ART), the crypto asset service provider (CASP) legal framework, and the topics MiCA 1.0 left untouched, chief among them decentralized finance and prediction markets.
MiCA entered full application on December 30, 2024, with the first licenses issued in early 2025. Katie Harries, director and head of policy for Europe at Coinbase, described it as “a single, harmonised rulebook for crypto” that “gave the EU a first-mover advantage.” That advantage, she suggested, is not guaranteed to last. Harries noted that “refinements could help ensure the framework remains competitive in the next phase of digital asset regulation.”
Stablecoins and DeFi Take Center Stage
Stablecoin policy has become the fight everyone is watching. Under current MiCA rules, EMT issuers cannot offer interest, a restriction that in practice makes euro stablecoins harder to sell against dollar-pegged rivals that can pass yield to holders. Harries called for changes to “make euro stablecoins more competitive by recalibrating rules around reserves, rewards and the multi-issuance model.”
How stablecoins should even be classified remains unsettled, and the answer determines everything that follows. Catarina Veloso, director of regulatory and compliance at compliance firm Notabene, noted that the regulatory focus shifts with the label: if stablecoins are treated mainly as crypto trading instruments, investor protection and market integrity stay at the center; if they are treated as payment infrastructure, redemption, liquidity, reserve management, operational resilience and supervisory reporting move to the front. One framing regulates a security. The other regulates a payment rail.
DeFi is the other gap, and a larger one. MiCA does not cover fully decentralized CASPs that operate without intermediaries, leaving a void the consultation is meant to fill. The trouble is definitional. Veloso observed that “decentralisation is rarely binary,” which leaves regulators trying to draw a hard line through protocols that exist on a spectrum.
Prediction Markets and Jurisdictional Conflict
Prediction markets enter the consultation with no unified EU structure at all. They remain banned outright in some member states. Miroslav Đurić, senior associate at law firm Taylor Wessing, flagged the core problem: operators may face “conflicting requirements under MiFID II, gambling regulations, or MiCA depending on contract types.” The result is a patchwork, legal in one country and prohibited across the border.
Veloso characterized the stablecoin section as “the longest and arguably the most politically charged section of the consultation,” a signal of how far apart stakeholders sit on balancing financial stability, competition, and innovation.
Timeline to Legislative Proposals
None of this moves quickly. Đurić indicated that concrete legislative proposals are not expected before 2028 at the earliest, meaning the revision will unfold over roughly two years after public comment closes. Harries framed that runway as the point, not the delay: “dialogue between industry, policymakers and regulators, learning from how the framework is working in practice” will be what refines MiCA. Coinbase, along with compliance and legal firms, has signaled it intends to stay at the table.
With binding proposals years away, the consultation reads less like a finish line than a referendum on whether Europe’s early bet on crypto regulation can keep pace with the market it set out to govern.
