EU Crypto Legislation MiCA clears final hurdle – Ledger Insights

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Today, the Council of the EU approved the Regulation on Crypto Asset Markets (MiCAR) after the European Parliament approved it in April. This was the last step in passing the law. It is expected to come into force around July this year, so some provisions will apply from July 2024, including those for stablecoins.

Elisabeth Svantesson, Swedish Finance Minister who chaired the Council meeting, said: “Recent events have confirmed the urgent need to impose rules that will better protect Europeans who have invested in these assets and prevent the misuse of the cryptography industry for the purposes of money laundering and terrorist financing.

MiCAR also had a companion bill that imposes the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) travel rule on crypto, which was also approved by the Board today. This means that sender and receiver details must be transmitted whenever a crypto-asset service provider is involved in a transaction. Originally there was supposed to be a threshold of 1000, but it was dropped, so the travel rule is required for transfers of just pennies.

However, p2p transactions between self-hosted wallets are excluded, and if the transaction is between a self-hosted wallet and an exchange, then there is a threshold of 1000.

Svantesson described the AML regulations as “an important step forward in the fight against money laundering”.

We have previously explored the possibility of these two regulations and others having an impact on stablecoins.

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