Regulation · MiCA

MiCA: crypto-asset service providers, issuers and white papers

MiCA — the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, (EU) 2023/1114 — regulates offering crypto-assets to the public and providing crypto-asset services in the EU. Issuers and offerors need a compliant white paper (Art. 6); crypto-asset service providers need an authorisation (Art. 59) and have to meet conduct, prudential, custody and complaint-handling rules. CASPs are also financial entities in the sense of DORA.

Applies to

Issuers and offerors of crypto-assets, asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens; anyone providing crypto-asset services — exchange, custody, trading platform, transfer, advice, portfolio management — in the EU.

Three token regimes

Other crypto-assets (Title II), asset-referenced tokens (Title III) and e-money tokens (Title IV) — with escalating requirements.

Authorisation is the gate

Art. 59–63: a CASP needs authorisation from a national authority (the KNF in Poland) and can then passport across the EU.

DORA applies

CASPs and ART issuers are financial entities under Art. 2(1)(f)–(g) DORA: the ICT risk framework, incident reporting and vendor rules all apply.

The white paper

Art. 6 and Annex I set out the content of a crypto-asset white paper: information about the offeror, the issuer, the project, the offer, the crypto-asset, the rights and obligations, the technology, the risks and — since 2025 — the climate and environmental impact. It has to be notified to the competent authority before publication (Art. 8) and must not contain misleading statements. Audomate's document drafts generate the white paper section by section from your project documents and check it against Annex I.

CASP authorisation in one table

Requirement	Article	Note
Authorisation from the competent authority	Art. 59, 62–63	A legal person in the EU; application content in Art. 62(2); passporting under Art. 65
Prudential safeguards	Art. 67	Own funds or insurance, depending on the service (Annex IV)
Governance, fitness of management	Art. 68	A management body of good repute and competence; assessment of shareholders
Custody of client assets	Art. 70	Segregation, no use of client assets without consent
Complaints, conflicts of interest, outsourcing	Art. 71–73	Documented procedures
Orderly wind-down plan	Art. 74	A plan for an orderly wind-down
Service-specific rules	Art. 75–83	Custody, trading platforms, exchange, order execution, placing, transfer, advice, portfolio management
Market abuse	Title VI, Art. 86–92	Inside information, insider dealing, manipulation
Digital operational resilience	DORA	A CASP is a financial entity; the whole of DORA applies

Timeline and transition

30 June 2024 — Titles III and IV (ARTs and EMTs) start to apply.
30 December 2024 — full application, including CASP authorisation.
A transitional period for existing providers operating under national law — up to 18 months, shortened in several countries; the Polish crypto-asset act sets the national regime and names the KNF.

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Questions we get most often

Does MiCA apply to NFTs?

Unique and non-fungible crypto-assets are excluded (Art. 2(3)) — but fractionalised or large-series NFTs that are fungible in practice can be in scope. What decides is the token's characteristics, not its label.

Do we need a MiCA authorisation to serve EU customers from outside the EU?

Yes, unless the customer initiates the service at their own exclusive initiative (reverse solicitation, Art. 61) — a narrow exception that cannot be used to market to EU customers.

What does DORA add to MiCA for a CASP?

Art. 68 MiCA requires resilient ICT systems and refers to DORA; as a financial entity, a CASP applies the full DORA framework — ICT risk management, major incident reporting, resilience testing and Art. 28–30 towards ICT vendors, including custody technology and cloud providers.

Updated 7 September 2026 · This page explains the rules in plain language and is not legal advice. What applies to you always depends on your own contracts and services.

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