EU Committee Backs MiCA Review of DeFi and Staking Ahead of July 7 Vote

MICA News

The European Parliament's economic affairs committee has urged the European Commission to assess whether decentralized finance, staking, crypto lending and non-fungible tokens should be regulated under MiCA, the bloc's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. The recommendation forms part of an own-initiative report from the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, tabled Friday and scheduled for a plenary vote on July 7. Drafted by Belgian lawmaker Johan Van Overtveldt, the resolution asks the Commission to evaluate whether additional crypto activities, including automated market maker protocols, warrant formal oversight. If adopted, it would establish Parliament's official position on digital-asset policy without amending MiCA or creating new legal obligations.

The report also signals a markedly warmer stance toward regulated stablecoins. It explicitly welcomes euro-denominated tokens issued under MiCA and encourages their development to strengthen the European Union's payments sector, framing them as infrastructure rather than a systemic threat. The endorsement covers fiat-backed designs and contrasts sharply with the bloc's continued wariness toward algorithmic stablecoins, whose code-enforced pegs remain outside the regulation's favored model. Lawmakers argue that a credible euro stablecoin would reduce the European market's heavy reliance on dollar-pegged tokens, a dependency that policymakers increasingly view as a strategic vulnerability for the region's monetary autonomy.

Beyond stablecoins, the resolution presses the Commission to promote tokenization across financial services, urging the bloc to embrace on-chain representations of bonds, funds and other traditional assets. The push reflects growing institutional interest in settling regulated securities on blockchain rails, where infrastructure such as stablecoin-native settlement layers is being built to handle compliant value transfer. By backing tokenization at the parliamentary level, EU lawmakers are signaling that the next phase of digital-asset policy will extend well beyond the spot trading and custody rules that MiCA originally codified, reaching into capital markets plumbing and the broader altcoin ecosystem that supports it.

The non-binding character of the measure is central to understanding its weight. As an own-initiative resolution, the text would, if approved on July 7, become Parliament's stated political position rather than enforceable law. It does not rewrite a single article of MiCA, nor does it impose obligations on issuers, exchanges or DeFi developers. Instead, it functions as a formal request to the Commission, the EU's executive arm, to study whether the framework's scope should later expand. The distinction matters because markets sometimes overread parliamentary votes as immediate rule changes when they are, in practice, early-stage policy signals.

The author's involvement underscores how far the conversation has shifted. Van Overtveldt, in 2023, called for tighter restrictions on cryptocurrencies in the wake of the banking turmoil surrounding Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank, at one point likening digital assets to drugs. His authorship of a report that now welcomes euro stablecoins and promotes tokenization marks a notable evolution from that crisis-era skepticism. The change tracks a broader recalibration among European policymakers, who increasingly distinguish between speculative trading risks and the infrastructure case for regulated, fiat-backed tokens within a defined legal perimeter.

The stablecoin debate carries direct memory of past failures. During the 2023 banking crisis, USDC issuer Circle held roughly $3.3 billion of its reserves at Silicon Valley Bank when the lender collapsed, briefly causing the token to lose its dollar peg before recovering. That episode hardened the EU's preference for strict reserve and redemption rules under MiCA, which already imposes the bloc's toughest stablecoin requirements. The new report's endorsement of euro tokens arrives alongside Parliament's recent support for a digital euro, suggesting lawmakers want both a public and a regulated-private path for on-chain euro liquidity to develop in parallel.

From COINOTAG's vantage point, MiCA is a regulatory framework rather than a tradeable asset, so our proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine returns no price, support or resistance levels here; the read is macro, not technical. Our aggregate market data shows the Fear & Greed Index pinned at 15/100, deep in Extreme Fear, with Bitcoin dominance elevated at 70.2% and total crypto market capitalization near $1.73 trillion as of this writing. That posture, capital crowding into Bitcoin while altcoins bleed, is the backdrop against which Europe is debating expanded oversight. Constructive regulation of euro stablecoins and tokenization could, over time, ease the institutional risk premium; a punitive expansion of MiCA into DeFi and staking would do the opposite.