Cardano Foundation urges EU not to widen crypto rules in MiCA review

The Cardano Foundation has published its submission to the European Commission's consultation reviewing the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR), using the opportunity to argue against expanding the rulebook — not for tightening it. In a blog post dated 21 October 2026, the Foundation's Benjamin Buergi wrote that the response was filed on 30 September 2026 and that its through-line is a single principle: "Regulation should follow the substance of an activity, the functions performed, and the risks created, not the technology through which it is conducted."

The Commission's "targeted consultation" is checking whether MiCAR, now in application, is working, and whether to extend it into areas it currently leaves out — decentralized finance (DeFi), staking, lending and borrowing, and parts of the NFT market. The Foundation's answer, across the board, is to leave the perimeter where it is.

On staking, it drew a line between protocol-level participation and intermediated services: on Cardano, it noted, ada holders delegate stake without transferring custody or locking assets, and it argued that kind of direct network participation should not be treated as a regulated service the way custodial or discretionary staking might be. On DeFi it recommended regulating "identifiable persons performing regulated functions and exercising meaningful control," rather than creating a standalone DeFi regime. On NFTs it urged preserving MiCAR's exclusion for genuinely unique tokens and opposed a broad reading of "fungibility" — membership in a collection, it said, shouldn't by itself make an NFT fungible. It made the same "assess under existing law" case for prediction markets, perpetual futures and crypto lending.

The Foundation also flagged practical fixes it does support: clearer treatment of global and multi-issuer stablecoins, less overlap between MiCAR and payment-services law, refined environmental-disclosure rules that account for different blockchain designs, harmonized conflict-of-laws rules for tokenized assets, and preserving "genuine reverse solicitation" for non-EU firms.

Key facts

• Response filed 30 September 2026; blog post published 21 October 2026 by Benjamin Buergi (Cardano Foundation).
• Scope of the EC consultation: MiCAR effectiveness plus DeFi, staking, lending/borrowing, NFTs, stablecoins, MiFID II boundary (Cardano Foundation).
• Core ask: no new regimes for DeFi, staking or NFT services; apply existing frameworks by function (Cardano Foundation).

The real-world read This is a position paper from an interested party, not neutral analysis — the Cardano Foundation is a stakeholder in a proof-of-stake network, and its most specific carve-out request (non-custodial staking shouldn't count as a regulated service) maps directly onto how Cardano's own staking works. That's legitimate advocacy, but read it as advocacy. The framing — "more regulation does not necessarily mean better regulation" and warnings that compliance costs favor "established players" — is a familiar deregulatory pitch. The submission's own text isn't public here beyond the Foundation's summary of it, and the Commission has not indicated how it will weigh any of these points. Whether regulators agree that staking and DeFi fall outside the perimeter remains entirely open.

This is reporting, not financial or legal advice.

Sources

• Cardano Foundation blog, "Reviewing MiCA: Cardano Foundation's Response to the European Commission's Public Consultation," Benjamin Buergi, 21 October 2026 — primary source for the submission date, positions and quotes. Note: this is the Foundation's own account of its own advocacy, i.e. an interested party summarizing its lobbying position; the full submission and the Commission's response were not available.