The Cardano Foundation has asked the European Commission not to write new, standalone rules for DeFi and staking into the MiCA review. The 19-page response, filed on 30 September 2026 and presented on 21 October, argues that regulation should follow what a firm does and what risks it creates, not the technology it runs on, according to Cointribune and crypto.news, which reviewed it. That puts the foundation behind the Cardano blockchain on the other side of the EU’s own supervisors: ESMA and the new anti-money-laundering authority AMLA, both filing by the same 30 September deadline, asked for a legal definition of DeFi and, in AMLA’s case, for staking, lending and borrowing to be brought inside MiCA.
The argument underneath all of these filings is about control. The foundation and ESMA both treat a holder who delegates their own tokens as the lightest case, not a firm running a financial service; AMLA does not take up the point. The split is over the firms in between: who counts as holding or steering other people’s assets, who decides that, and whether a new licence is needed for the platforms that open the door to DeFi protocols.
None of this changes the law. The Commission has tabled no proposal, and MiCA only obliges it to report to Parliament and the Council by 30 June 2027.
MiCA review on DeFi and staking: the Cardano Foundation’s case against new regimes
The core of the response, as both outlets describe it, is a refusal of new categories. The foundation wants no standalone framework for DeFi, no separate regime for staking and nothing specific for what it calls protocol-level participation. It would keep the existing split between MiCA, which covers crypto-assets that are not financial instruments, and MiFID II, which covers those that are, and fix the grey zones with clearer guidance rather than new law.
Its test for when the rules should apply is practical. According to crypto.news, the foundation asks supervisors to look at whether an identifiable person or company actually controls customer assets or transactions. Writing software, running nodes or supplying blockchain infrastructure should not, on that view, be a regulated financial service in itself.
Delegating ADA is not a staking service, the foundation says
Staking is where the foundation is most specific, and where its own chain shapes the argument. On Cardano, holders of ADA delegate their stake to a smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool operator without handing over custody and without locking their tokens; they can move them at any time. The foundation says this kind of participation supports the security and decentralisation of the network. Cointribune’s rendering of its position is that such delegation “should not be treated as a crypto staking service operated by an intermediary.”
The foundation does not say all staking is outside the rules. It separates direct participation in consensus from commercial staking services, where an intermediary may hold the tokens or decide what to do with them. Those services, it accepts, can be treated differently.
A note of analysis, flagged as ours. Cardano’s design makes the foundation’s line easy to draw: no custody changes hands, no tokens are locked. Other proof-of-stake chains bond or lock stake and apply penalties, and proof of stake coin with a protocol that stakes it for you and issues a transferable token (such as Lido stETH or rETH) representing the deposit plus rewards, which you can use or sell while the coins stay staked.">liquid staking issues a second token that can travel across DeFi. The same principle, applied to those models, gives less tidy answers, which is exactly the ground ESMA goes into in detail.
The rest of the 19 pages
The response, as crypto.news summarises it, also covers ground well beyond DeFi:
- Hybrid tokens whose classification differs from one member state to another need clearer guidance, and a token should be classified by its real features and the rights it carries, not by the fact that those rights are recorded on a blockchain.
- Stablecoins issued by several issuers at once, or across borders, need clearer treatment under MiCA, along with their overlap with EU payment-services law.
- The exclusion for genuinely unique NFTs should stay, with no separate regime for NFT services; prediction markets, perpetual futures and crypto lending should likewise be judged under the law their economic features point to.
- Conflict-of-laws rules should be harmonised so it is clear which country’s law governs a transaction, and legitimate reverse solicitation by non-EU firms should be supported.
- Environmental disclosures should reflect how differently blockchains are built, and complex new duties risk favouring large incumbents over smaller firms.
ESMA and AMLA want the opposite: a definition and a gateway service
ESMA, the EU’s markets authority, published its own answer on 30 September. Its press release asks for “clearer criteria for determining which activities can be considered genuinely decentralised” and for “proportionate requirements for staking, lending and borrowing, including through disclosure obligations”. It also wants a new regulated crypto-asset service for firms that give users access to DeFi protocols, stricter marketing rules for influencers and third parties, and binding powers for itself on how tokens are classified.
The detail sits in the full response, which the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer summarised in a note republished by Legal 500 on 14 October. ESMA wants DeFi defined in MiCA’s articles, not left in a recital, and the exemption for fully decentralised services kept narrow because the current wording is read differently across the Union. It worries about arrangements that call themselves decentralised while they have “identifiable operators or intermediaries”, a risk the note describes as decentralisation washing.
The new service would cover a crypto firm acting for its clients as a gateway to DeFi. That firm would have to disclose the risks of the protocols it offers, explain how it selects and routes to them, manage conflicts of interest, carry out due diligence on each protocol and keep operational and cyber safeguards in place.
On staking, ESMA is closer to the foundation than the headlines suggest. It treats staking as part of how proof-of-stake networks work and says it should not automatically be classed as lending or portfolio management. It then sorts staking into four kinds: direct staking by the holder, technical staking, pooled or custodial staking, and liquid staking or yield products, the last of which may raise further questions under MiCA, MiFID II or other financial law. Duties would rise with the degree of intermediation, the firm’s control over client assets, pooling and the firm’s discretion. Clients would be told about rewards, lock-up and unbonding periods, slashing risk, validator selection, fees, dependencies and what happens to their tokens if the firm fails.
AMLA, the EU’s anti-money-laundering authority, went further. Its response, dated 30 September in Frankfurt, notes that MiCA reaches staking only through the custody licence, which leaves out pooling, yield and the temporary handover of control. It asks the Commission to consider dedicated requirements that would bring staking, lending and borrowing inside MiCA, and extra management duties for crypto firms acting as gatekeepers to DeFi. It wants the law to define a “DeFi arrangement” and to set common criteria for spotting who exercises “effective control” over it. Such control, AMLA writes, can come from a concentration of governance tokens or from the power to pause or modify smart contracts. It also suggests reviewing whether some issuers of asset-referenced tokens should fall under anti-money-laundering rules, a single EU approach to unauthorised stablecoins and clearer information duties for firms working across borders.
Where the filings agree, and where they split
Set side by side, the three responses share a starting point and part ways quickly after it.
| Question | Cardano Foundation (as reported) | ESMA | AMLA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holder delegating own tokens | Not a service provider | Direct staking treated as lightest case | Not addressed in its response |
| DeFi definition in MiCA | No new standalone regime | Yes, in the articles, with a narrow exemption | Yes, a clear legal definition |
| Who has control | An identifiable party controlling assets or transactions | Watch for identifiable operators behind a decentralised label | Common EU criteria for effective control |
| Staking, lending, borrowing | No separate staking regime; intermediated services can differ | Proportionate duties scaled to intermediation, mainly disclosure | Consider bringing them inside MiCA |
| Platforms giving access to DeFi | Infrastructure is not a financial service in itself | New regulated gateway service | Possible extra duties for firms acting as gatekeepers |
France’s authorities sit between the two camps. Their joint paper of 21 October, from the AMF, the Treasury, the Banque de France and the ACPR, would make platforms check a protocol’s security before offering it, with liability only where a platform opened access without adequate checks or despite known risks. We covered it in our report on France’s MiCA review demands for ESMA supervision, staking and DeFi.
The MiCA dates several outlets got wrong
Coverage of the foundation’s filing gives conflicting dates for MiCA itself, so here is what the regulation’s text on EUR-Lex says. Under Article 149, Titles III and IV, the rules for asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens (the stablecoin titles), have applied since 30 June 2024. The rest of the regulation, including the rules for crypto-asset service providers, has applied since 30 December 2024.
The date of 1 July 2026, which Cointribune gives as the start of MiCA, is the end of something else. Article 143 let firms already working under national law continue until 1 July 2026 or until their licence was granted or refused, whichever came first, and member states could shorten that period. Since 1 July 2026 no firm anywhere in the Union can rely on that grace period.
A second error: some outlets still give 31 August as the consultation deadline. The Commission extended it by a month, to 30 September 2026, which is why the ESMA, AMLA and Cardano Foundation responses all carry that date.
What the Commission asked, and what comes next
The consultation opened on 20 May 2026 with two questionnaires: a public one on users’ experience and a targeted one for firms, authorities and specialists. The targeted version covers MiCA’s current requirements and the areas it left out, namely DeFi, crypto lending, staking and NFTs. According to a summary by the law firm Maples, the Commission did not propose dropping the exclusion for fully decentralised services. It asked which factors decide how decentralised a service is, whether crypto firms should carry due-diligence, disclosure or liability duties when they offer DeFi, and whether certification schemes would help.
The question is not new. Article 142 of MiCA already asked the Commission for a report by 30 December 2024 assessing whether regulating DeFi, and lending and borrowing, was necessary and feasible. The review now under way is the broader one in Article 140, due by 30 June 2027 and to be “accompanied, where appropriate, by a legislative proposal”.
Few expect quick law. Miroslav Đurić, senior associate at Taylor Wessing, told Cointelegraph in June that “it is hardly expectable that any concrete legislative proposals will be adopted before 2028.” Peter Kerstens, an adviser at the Commission described as one of MiCA’s architects, said at the WAIB Summit in Monaco in June that DeFi had “no representatives” and asked: “I don’t see what the problem is. And if there is no problem, why should it be regulated?” Those were personal remarks, not Commission policy.
Pressure runs the other way too. The European Parliament adopted a report in July asking the Commission to assess whether DeFi lending, staking, yield products and NFTs need rules, Finance Magnates reported on 8 July. The report is a request to the Commission, not legislation. crypto.news also reports that the ECB and national central banks have proposed extending the ban on paying interest on stablecoins to indirect returns from lending, borrowing and staking.
Some voices are absent. We found no published response from Blockchain for Europe, the European Crypto Initiative, France’s ADAN, Coinbase or any large exchange, and the Commission has not published a page of responses or a summary. The foundation, ESMA, AMLA and France are the filings on the record today, not the whole debate.
What changes for users in France and Italy
Nothing, for now. A French holder who stakes through a licensed platform deals with a firm authorised by the AMF. In Italy, Consob and the Banca d’Italia are the national MiCA authorities, and the OAM keeps the register of crypto providers that operated before MiCA. Italy has not published a filing of its own that we could find.
The review matters for the line between two ways of staking. Delegating from your own wallet, where you keep the keys, is the case every filing treats most lightly. Staking through an exchange that pools customer tokens is where ESMA’s graded duties and AMLA’s call to bring staking inside MiCA would bite first. Our guide to what MiCA means for crypto users explains what a licensed provider already owes its clients.
What control means in MiCA, in short
MiCA does not define DeFi. Recital 22 says the regulation applies to services “performed, provided or controlled, directly or indirectly” by people or companies, even when part of the service runs in a decentralised way, and that services provided “in a fully decentralised manner without any intermediary” fall outside it. Recitals guide interpretation but are not binding articles, which is why ESMA wants the definition moved into the text.
In practice the test comes down to whether someone can be identified who holds the assets, can move them, or decides how a service runs. Staking shows how hard that is: the same act of putting tokens to work in a proof-of-stake network can mean keeping full custody, handing it to a pool, or receiving a liquid token in exchange. Our DeFi explainer covers how those models differ. The Commission’s report is due by 30 June 2027.