EUROPEAN BANKING AUTHORITY IS STRUGGLING TO FIND SPECIALISED CRYPTO MARKET SUPERVISORS

The new European crypto regulation on "Markets in Crypto-assets" called MiCA designed the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) as the competent authorities to regulate and supervise the crypto markets in Europe.

José Manuel Campa, chair of EBA, said recently that these organizations have "major concerns" about the ability to hire specialized staff to help regulate crypto especially since they won’t know what cryptocurrencies they will have to supervise until almost 2025 when MiCA will take effect and that they are having hard time retaining skills in these areas.

MiCA regulation already mentioned this issue and allocated a predefined budget for EBA and ESMA in order to recrute few specialised supervisors. "Staff Expenditure" is estimated to be at least for 5 employees with salaries and contract costs above 350,000 EUR at first year or so.

MiCA indicates also that: "While the EBA will need to recruit specialist personnel, the duties and functions to be undertaken to implement the proposed legislation are in line with the remit and tasks of the EBA.(...) Specifically, the EBA will need to train and hire specialist to fulfil the duties of the direct supervision as envisaged in this proposal for the supervision of issuers of significant asset-referenced tokens."

As a reminder, the EBA is a special Union body contributing to the stability and effectiveness of the financial system defining payments rulebooks and operating innovative payment systems such as Instant Payment scheme and registering the supervised payment agents in Europe and it has been recently been empowered to supervise also the crypto industry.