MiCa, AMLA and EU’s 'wild west' problem: Law Decoded, June 27-July 4

cointelegraph.com:

According to the European parliament member and rapporteur for the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation Stefan Berger, the deal on landmark pan-European Union regulation had been finally struck amid the Tripartite negotiations. It “will put an end to the crypto wild west,” as French Minister for the Economy Bruno Le Maire hopes. Still, while raising a modest optimism among some stakeholders, MiCa’s final draft will surely make life harder for others. 

A prime example here is the case with stablecoins, which would get a daily transaction cap of 200 million euros under the new regulation. With Tether (USDT) and USD Coin’s (USDC) 24-hour daily volumes standing at 48.13 billion euros and 5.40 billion euros, respectively, the new guidelines could be interpreted as a sort of indirect ban on stablecoins. The provisional agreement will also see crypto asset providers (CASPs) needing authorization in order to operate in the EU, with the largest CASPS to be monitored by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).

European lawmakers clearly don’t like a “wild west” — to the point when they’re attaching the variations of this metaphor to almost anything they deem to need a fix. The same last week, European Parliament member Ernest Urtasun claimed to put an end to the “wild west of unregulated crypto” with a European Council agreement to form an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) body that will have the authority to supervise certain CASPs. The new regulator would probably get an obvious name of AMLA.

Two weeks between being fined for selling the unregistered securities and getting the very license it lacked — that’s what happened with a crypto lending platform BlockFi in the state of Iowa. The new license is a glimmer of