EU's MiCA Bill to Enter Next Phase of Negotiations on Thursday

The next set of negotiations concerning the European Union's (EU) landmark Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulations package is set to begin on Thursday.

Following the EU legislative process, MiCA will now be the subject of informal tripartite discussions (called trilogues) involving the bloc's branches of government – the Commission, Parliament and Council.

Stefan Berger, the parliamentarian in charge of overseeing the framework as it moves through the legislative process, confirmed with CoinDesk that the trilogues will begin on Thursday as planned.

The MiCA framework, which was introduced in 2020, aims to simplify expansion for crypto businesses throughout the EU's 27 member nations, and covers a wide range of rules for crypto issuers and service providers. It also includes special regulatory requirements for stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of other assets like the U.S. dollar.

The framework recently made it through the European Parliament after a few tense weeks as lawmakers debated including provisions that could have effectively banned popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) in the EU over worries the networks supporting these currencies consume too much energy.

Read more: Europe’s Landmark Crypto Regulation Is Advancing, but New Privacy Rules May Be More Important

Following a close vote in the Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee earlier this month, the draft shed the divisive measure and is now moving, unchallenged, to the next phase of discussions.

Any agreements reached in the trilogues are informal and need to be formally approved by each of the institutions involved. Although major changes are rarely adopted during this phase, legislators may still need to finalize a number of details such as the agencies that will be tasked with overseeing the crypto space, and whether decentralized finance (DeFi) or non-fungible tokens (NFT) should be included in the scope of the framework.