What ESMA Said ESMA's April 2026 statement sets out the authority's expectations in direct terms. Any entity providing crypto-asset services to EU clients after 1 July 2026 without a MiCA authorisation will be in breach of EU law and must stop providing those services. The statement covers the full scope of regulated activity under MiCA: issuance of crypto-assets including asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens, and the provision of crypto-asset services including custod

For years, the stablecoin market has been a dollar story. Of the $305 billion in stablecoins in circulation as of January 2026, over 99% are denominated in US dollars. That asymmetry is not just a currency statistic — it is a structural risk for European financial markets, a competitive disadvantage for EU-based institutions, and a potential sovereignty problem for European regulators. A consortium of twelve of Europe's largest banks just decided to do something about it

Digital Plumbing evolving The debate about whether tokenisation works has largely been settled. The harder question, the one that will define the next two years, is whether the financial system's underlying infrastructure can support a transition from carefully managed pilots to genuine production scale. From Proof of Concept to Production Problem 2025 was, by most measures, the year institutional tokenisation stopped being theoretical. The EU's MiCA framework became operat

the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued joint guidance that the digital assets industry has been waiting over a decade for. For the first time, the SEC formally defined different types of crypto assets and how the regulator will approach them — ending years of enforcement-by-litigation and replacing it with a clear taxonomy.