The Commission's 2020 Proposal for a Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (‘MiCAR’): A Brief Introductory Overview

Abstract

The aim of the present University notes is to provide a brief but comprehensive overview of the European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council “on Markets in Crypto-Assets (…)” (MiCAR), which was submitted on 24 September 2020. It is not based on any articles (out of an already vast existing literature) relating to the subject-area of crypto assets. It exclusively presents, in a systematic way, the recitals and the provisions of the proposed EU legislative act, several of which is reasonably expected that will be amended or even further enhanced by (inter alia) the European Parliament and the Council during the legislative procedure in the coming months. The ultimate expectation is that they could lay down a solid background for further (and apparently substantial) research in this upcoming EU regulatory framework.

The nine Sections of the study fully correspond to the Titles of the proposed Regulation. Furthermore, Sub-section 1 of Section I contains a general introduction to this (proposed) legislative act in the context (inter alia) of the Commission’s 2020 “Digital Finance Package”.

Keywords: crypto-assets, distributed ledger technology (DLT), digital operational resilience, asset-referenced tokens, e-money tokens, utility tokens, security tokens, central bank digital currencies (CBDC), crypto-asset services, crypto-asset service providers

JEL Classification: D82, D92, E02, E22, E44, F21, F65, G11, G12, G14, G15, G18, G21, G23, G24, G28, K10, K20, K22, K23,