ESMA to focus 2027 MiCA supervision on resilience and EU operations

What happened

The European Securities and Markets Authority has put crypto assets at the center of its 2027 work program. The regulator said its MiCA work next year will concentrate on coordinating national regulators and on more consistent supervision of crypto asset service providers across the European Union.

The areas it names are operational resilience, outsourcing, liquidity, reverse solicitation and the classification of crypto assets. Supervisors will also check whether firms maintain sufficient operations inside the EU instead of relying on functions or infrastructure based elsewhere.

Chair Verena Ross told the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs that ESMA's MiCA work had moved "from rulemaking towards supervision and convergence." She said the aim is for innovation to flourish inside a framework that gives firms clarity, investors safeguards and markets confidence.

ESMA expects the first phase of MIDAS, its centralized crypto market surveillance system, to become fully operational in 2027. The system will be used to identify and prevent potential market abuse cases.

Why it matters

Supervision is shifting from licensing decisions to how firms behave after authorization. ESMA's Common Supervisory Action on MiCA custodians, which started in July, tests operational risk controls, and it moved scrutiny toward the controls used after receiving a license.

ESMA also plans a more consistent approach to the periodic information that crypto asset service providers submit to national regulators. That would give national authorities a common basis for comparing firms across the bloc.

Supervisory findings will feed into the European Commission's MiCA review, which is expected by June 2027. The 2027 priorities could therefore shape how the framework is amended.

Background

Cyber and operational resilience will remain an EU-wide supervisory priority in 2027, alongside a new priority covering digital innovation. ESMA said on Sept. 23 that the new work will initially focus on how supervised entities use artificial intelligence and tokenization, and that the resilience priority dates back to 2025.

ESMA has also reviewed event contracts markets, also known as prediction markets. It has warned that many of these platforms fall under binary options regulation and should be licensed under MiFID II.

What is still unclear

• The reports do not say how many crypto asset service providers the 2027 priorities will cover, or what supervisory outcomes ESMA expects.
• ESMA plans common risk indicators and reporting standards, but the reports do not describe the final format or how national authorities will apply them.

Questions readers ask