The European Central Bank has thrown its weight behind a contentious EU plan to centralize supervision of major financial markets — including crypto — moving authority from national regulators to a single, bloc-level watchdog.
According to Reuters, the ECB’s formal opinion supports an EU Commission proposal, championed by France and Germany, to integrate the capital markets under a centralized supervisory structure. The aim: boost Europe’s competitiveness, harmonize rules across borders and create “deeper integration of capital markets and financial market supervision within the Union,” the ECB said in its statement. The opinion is a required step in the Commission’s legislative process but is not binding on lawmakers.
What’s being proposed
- The plan would hand the power to authorize new businesses and to supervise all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) — along with major trading platforms, central counterparties and central securities depositories — to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).
- ESMA’s chair, Verena Ross, has argued that national-level regulation duplicates costly expertise-building across member states and that responsibility “could have been done more efficiently once at a European level.”
Practical hurdles flagged by the ECB
- The ECB stressed ESMA must be given adequate resources and staff to absorb these expanded responsibilities, and suggested a gradual transition from national to EU-level supervision to reduce disruption.
Next steps
- The Commission’s proposal will now be negotiated between EU governments and the European Parliament — a process likely to take several months.
Opposition and industry concerns
- Several member states and industry actors have pushed back, warning centralization could weaken national regulators’ work and unsettle firms that have adapted to country-level oversight. Smaller financial centers including Luxembourg, Ireland and Malta have voiced particular concern that the shift could harm their sectors.
- ESMA itself previously found faults in Malta’s handling of pan‑EU crypto licenses last year, saying the national regulator “partially met expectations” despite having adequate staffing and infrastructure.
Voices from the crypto sector and policy community
- Robert Kopitsch, secretary general of Blockchain for Europe, told Bitcoinist that reopening MiCA now risks legal uncertainty, delays in authorization, and diversion of resources away from implementing the framework. He favors waiting for “concrete experience and evidence” from MiCA’s initial years before centralizing supervision.
- Andrew Whitworth, founder of Global Policy Ltd., warned the transfer would require significant additional resources and could be difficult given the current implementation timeline.
- Judith Arnal of the Centre for European Credit Research Institute and a Bank of Spain board member cautioned that attempts to amend MiCA — notably around stablecoins — risk “undermining MiCA’s credibility as a coherent and globally influential regulatory framework.”
Why it matters for crypto
If adopted, the plan would shift licensing and oversight for crypto firms from national authorities to ESMA, changing where firms apply for authorization and who enforces pan‑EU rules. Proponents argue this could streamline cross-border operations and create a single rule-set for the continent; critics say it risks centralizing power before MiCA’s effects are fully understood and could disrupt the market during a sensitive implementation phase.
Legislators in Brussels and member states will now debate the proposal — an outcome that will shape the EU’s regulatory architecture for crypto and broader capital markets for years to come.
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