When creating the legal framework for regulations in the financial sector, the European legislator had primarily traditional financial services in mind. As a result, novel technologies and products, in particular distributed ledger technologies ("DLT") and crypto-assets, are not satisfactorily regulated.

On the one hand, this may have the effect of unnecessarily hampering innovation in finance, and on the other hand, novel developments may pose previously unknown risks.

Therefore, as part of the Digital Finance Package, in order to promote digital finance, the EU legislator adopted Regulation (EU) 2022/858 of 30 May 2022 on a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology (DLT pilot regime), which was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 02 June 2022, which enters into force today (22. June 2022) and which will apply as of 23 March 2023.

On 1st of March, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published an answer to a question which had been submitted by the card schemes. What impact will this have on the various use cases or the liability of the card issuer and how does BaFin view this?

The European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published their reports on ICOs and Crypto-Assets on 9 January 2018 (EBA Report and ESMA Advice). Both EU authorities highlight issues relating to the current EU regulatory framework and call for an EU-wide approach to ICO and Crypto-Asset regulation.

Our previous articles showed the influence of national and european legislation on virtual currencies, however only being a partial area of the payment business. Here is also an example of international influence: The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published a statement on 19th October. The FATF plans the progressive publication of guidelines for the supervision and control of virtual asset service providers.