With a combination of finalisation of existing legislative proposals and publication of new ones, the EU has over the past month made significant advances in the regulation of 21st century financial services in areas as diverse as crypto-assets, market infrastructures and crowdfunding. In three new Insights, Plesner's market-leading Fintech specialists analyse the new and proposed rules that will shape important parts of the EU financial regulatory framework for digital finance for years to come.
During the last month, the European Commission has unveiled proposals for a comprehensive legal framework for the regulation of markets in crypto-assets and a new and innovative pilot regime on distributed ledger market infrastructure. These proposals are part of the European Commission's new Digital Finance Strategy, a strategy launched on 24 September 2020 and seek to achieve greater legal certainty to the growing crypto-assets industry and general use of distributed ledger technology in both fintech and more traditional financial services firms.
Separately, on 20 October 2020 a new regulation on the provision of crowdfunding services was published in the Official Journal which will regulate the cross-border provision of both equity crowdfunding and crowdlending services. The regulation is intended to create a single market for crowdfunding and to help ensure that crowdfunding service providers will no longer need to ponder multiple national crowdfunding legal regimes when considering whether to provide their services on a cross-border basis.
While these new and proposed rules will bring significantly more clarity of the legal frameworks for market participants, the proposals and rules will also impose new and substantial legal requirements on market participants.
In order to provide an overview over the new rules, we have prepared insights into each of the new proposals and rules, all of which can be found via the following here:
- Draft regulation on markets in crypto-assets: end of the crypto-asset "pump and dump" and Ponzi-schemes?
- Pilot regime on DLT market infrastructure
- European crowdfunding platforms - new opportunities for alternative financing for start-ups and SMEs
Originally Published by Plesner, October 2020
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