Already building, nothing decided: the MiCA review and the banks' wager

On 20 May 2026 the European Commission published a targeted consultation on the review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The document runs to 86 questions in four parts. Responses were originally due by 31 August 2026; the deadline has since been extended to 30 September 2026.

The deadline is the weakest part of this story. Consultations run all the time, and a date in a procedural calendar decides nothing by itself. The situation becomes interesting once two things are placed side by side. The supervisory authorities disagree publicly on a core question before the Commission has decided anything. And a banking consortium is already building the very product whose rules are under negotiation.

What is genuinely on the table

The first question in the document is also the most consequential. It reopens the architecture of the past few years: should crypto-assets that qualify as financial instruments remain under sectoral law, or should everything recorded and traded on distributed ledgers fall under MiCA in principle? The original wording runs: "Should crypto-assets that qualify as financial instruments as defined in Directive 2014/65/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council, continue to be governed by sectorial legislation (MiFID/MiFIR/MAR/Prospectus Regulation, etc.), or should all assets that are recorded and transacted on distributed ledgers and that meet the definition of a crypto-asset, or the services provided on such assets, in principle be covered by MiCA?"

Question 7 names the borderline cases with unusual precision: "hybrid tokens, wrapped assets, tokenised fund interests, tokenised money-market instruments, governance tokens, synthetic exposures, or assets marketed as NFTs but issued in series". Anyone who reads tokenised fund interests or tokenised money-market instruments in that list is looking at their own product catalogue.

The fourth part of the document covers ground the original regulation never addressed. Tokenised deposits belong here, and the Commission defines them as "digital representations of traditional commercial bank deposits recorded on a blockchain or distributed ledger, allowing for programmable, instant 24/7 settlements". Questions 74 to 79 work through the benefits case by case, from payments to delivery-versus-payment settlement to intraday liquidity, then ask how all of this sits with the capital framework and with deposit guarantee schemes.

The widest gap sits at the end. Questions 80 to 85 concern property law for tokens: ownership, transfer, effect against third parties, the taking of collateral, treatment in insolvency and the risk running through multi-tier custody chains. The options the Commission puts forward include full harmonisation across the EU, partial harmonisation, a dedicated regime for distributed-ledger registers, and a purely conflict-of-laws solution.

Why this reaches firms with no crypto business

The obvious reflex is to assume that a crypto review concerns crypto firms only. It does not hold, for three independent reasons.

First, the boundary between MiCA and MiFID is not a side issue but the first of the consultation's four parts. It touches every institution that issues, holds in custody or trades conventional securities and intends to tokenise them. Second, tokenised deposits are core banking business rather than a niche product. Third, the European Banking Authority (EBA) ended the transition period between the payment services regime and MiCA with its opinion EBA/OP/2026/01 of 12 February 2026. Since 2 March 2026, transfers of e-money tokens that constitute a payment service must comply fully with the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2). That reaches even banks that handle such tokens only in payments.

The supervisors disagree before anything is decided

The point of contention is multi-issuance: may the same stablecoin be issued in parallel by an issuer inside the EU and one outside it, with the tokens fungible across both? The Commission treats this as open and asks in questions 30, 40 and 41 whether such models should remain possible and whether an equivalence regime for global stablecoins should be created instead. Under current law, multi-issuance is not prohibited.

The European Central Bank (ECB) takes a narrower view. Several trade publications consistently describe a non-paper dated 10 April 2026, an informal document not formally attributable to the institution, in which the ECB is said to argue that MiCA does not permit multi-issuance with third countries, on the grounds that issuers outside the EU need not meet equivalent protections. The paper itself has not been published, as is customary for such documents, so its wording cannot be read directly. The direction is consistent with the public remarks of Executive Board member Piero Cipollone, who in May and July 2026 warned that stablecoins could erode bank deposits and argued for leaving the settlement function to private tokens while anchoring the money function in central bank money.

For practitioners, who eventually prevails matters less than the fact of the disagreement. Two European institutions hold different views on a core question, and the consultation is precisely where that argument is playing out. Anyone filing a response is not writing into a vacuum but into a live dispute.

Why "deregulation under American pressure" falls short

The common reading casts the review as Europe's answer to the GENIUS Act, the American stablecoin law signed on 18 July 2025. Its terms are demanding: full backing in cash or short-dated US Treasuries, a prohibition on issuer-paid interest, and full effect no later than January 2027.

Two qualifications belong with that reading. First, the Commission does not name the act anywhere in its consultation text. The connection is a plausible reading by the specialist press, not a statement about its own motives. Second, and more importantly: the review runs in both directions at once. Where the competitiveness of EU-based issuers is at stake, the Commission is considering easing both the interest prohibition and the rules on which assets may serve as reserves. Where control over third countries is at stake, everything points the other way. The ECB is calling for limits on multi-issuance, and the EBA ended a transition period in the middle of the review rather than extending it. Describing the exercise as deregulation alone leaves out half of it.

The building has started while the terms are still open

Alongside the consultation, a euro stablecoin is taking shape from within the banking sector. The vehicle is Qivalis B.V., registered by its own account with the Dutch Trade Register under number 98235680. In February 2026 the consortium counted twelve institutions, among them BNP Paribas, CaixaBank, DekaBank, DZ BANK, ING, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB and UniCredit. On 20 May 2026 a further 25 joined, taking the group to roughly 37 houses.

The revealing part lies buried in the small print on the company's own website. Qivalis has applied to De Nederlandsche Bank for authorisation as an electronic money institution and states plainly that it is "not yet authorised and does not currently issue electronic money or provide payment services".

The observation worth taking away is this: some 37 banks are investing in infrastructure for a product whose licence has not been granted and whose future terms, from the permitted reserve model to the question of multi-issuance, are only now out for consultation. This is not poor planning. It is a deliberate wager that a market position will be harder to win later than regulatory compliance will be to catch up on. For institutions still waiting, that is precisely the question on the table.

What this means in practice

Four starting points for treasury, securities operations, compliance and digital-asset teams.