ICMA responds to the European Commission’s targeted consultation on the review of MiCAR
30 September 2026 The International Capital Market Association (“ICMA”) submitted on Monday, 28 September 2026, its response to the European Commission’s targeted consultation on the review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (the “MiCAR Review”).
ICMA’s response reflects the views of a subset of ICMA's DLT Bonds Working Group, which includes issuers, banks, investors, market infrastructures, law firms, data providers as well as technology providers across the spectrum of international debt capital markets.
Key points:
- Scope: Tokenised securities qualifying as financial instruments under MiFID II should remain governed by sectoral legislation. Bringing them into MiCAR’s scope would run counter to the European Union’s efforts to deepen capital markets integration, promote growth, simplify regulation and strengthen its competitiveness. It would create uncertainty for tokenised securities already issued, hamper the nascent market for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based securities and could undermine the Eurosystem’s Pontes initiative and Appia roadmap. Technological neutrality and equivalent prudential, legal and regulatory treatment of DLT-based and traditional debt securities (including collateral eligibility) remain essential.
- Stablecoins as settlement assets: While wholesale central bank digital currency (“wCBDC”) is the settlement asset of choice for market participants who have access to central bank money, participants without it require other forms of “cash on chain”, including electronic money tokens (“EMTs”, or fiat-backed stablecoins). This is especially important with a view to developing secondary market liquidity for DLT-based debt securities. The framework should recognise EMTs as eligible settlement assets and collateral.
- Reserve requirements: ICMA members recommend lowering the minimum deposit requirements for EMT issuers (currently 30%, or 60% for significant EMTs), allowing a greater share of reserves to be held in high-quality, low-risk short-term instruments to support the international competitiveness of EU EMT issuers. Counterparty exposure limits on reserves held with any single EU credit institution could also be considered. Members also expressed diverging views on whether credit institutions issuing EMTs should be subject to reserve maintenance and segregation requirements.
- Redemption: The ability for EMTs to be redeemed at par within short and reasonable timeframes is a critical prerequisite for widespread adoption, including during periods of elevated redemption activity. As such, EMT issuers should be required to fulfil redemption requests within 24 hours from receipt of the request, completion of compliance checks and receipt of EMTs in wallet. These timeframe adjustments should also take into account frameworks adopted by relevant third-country jurisdictions to promote cross-border alignment.
- Tokenised deposits: Tokenised deposits are a valuable complement to wCBDC, as a deployable form of “cash on chain” which preserves the risk profile and features of traditional bank deposits. To fully unlock their potential as settlement assets and collateral, ICMA members call for: (i) explicit recognition of tokenised deposits as eligible settlement assets and collateral; (ii) support for interoperable “multibank” solutions; (iii) international engagement on a targeted review of the Basel crypto-asset standard (SCO60) to achieve technology-neutral prudential treatment; (iv) criteria to distinguish tokenised deposits from EMTs, without creating a separate framework; and (v) supervisory guidance (eg guidelines or FAQs), consistent with any applicable settlement finality legislation.
ICMA’s detailed response can be found here.
