Stablecoins under MiCA, and the PSD2 question for e-money tokens

Who may issue, and what happened to non-compliant tokens

Titles III and IV of MiCA have applied since 30 June 2024; the EBA marked the date with a statement on compliance expectations and published its supervisory priorities for issuers: internal governance, financial resilience, technology risk and financial crime. The market felt the consequence through the platforms: ESMA's statement on non-compliant ARTs and EMTs, building on the Commission's Q&A, required trading platforms to delist them and other providers to end the order and exchange services that amounted to offering them to the public, restricting acquisition by the end of January 2025 and allowing sell-only services until the end of Q1 2025 while mere custody and transfer remained possible, which is why EEA users watched non-compliant stablecoins disappear from major venues.

The classification question that decides everything upstream, whether a token is an ART, an EMT or neither, now runs through the ESAs' standardised classification test, and it is worth doing formally: the label drives the licence, the reserve and the supervision.

Two qualifications belong on the record. The offer need not come from the issuer: with the issuer's written consent another person may offer the token or seek its admission, carrying the marketing and white-paper duties with it (Articles 16(1) and 48(1)). And the authorisation gate has carve-outs: an ART whose average outstanding value never exceeds EUR 5 million over twelve months, outside any network of exempt issuers, or which is offered to and held by qualified investors only, needs no authorisation but still a notified white paper (Article 16(2)); an EMT issued under the small-issuer waiver of the E-Money Directive is outside Article 48(1), and e-money outside that Directive is outside Title IV almost entirely (Article 48(4) and (5)).

The reserve

MiCA's principle differs by token type, and the difference matters. Asset-referenced tokens must be backed by a reserve of assets legally segregated from the issuer's estate, so that creditors have no recourse to it, in particular on insolvency (Article 36(1) and (2)). E-money tokens are not: an electronic money institution issuing them safeguards the funds under Article 7(1) of Directive 2009/110/EC, with Article 54 MiCA requiring at least 30 per cent of the funds received to sit in separate accounts at credit institutions and the remainder to be invested in secure, low-risk assets that qualify as highly liquid financial instruments with minimal market, credit and concentration risk under Article 38(1) and are denominated in the currency the token references; a credit institution issuing an EMT holds the funds as a bank and stands outside Articles 54 and 58. The Article 36 reserve regime reaches an electronic money institution only once its token is significant (Article 58(1)(a)) or the home authority so requires (Article 58(2)).

The detail sits in the EBA's technical layer, and it is still moving. The minimum content of the liquidity management policy is now binding law: Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1264 of 27 June 2025 entered into force on 23 October 2025, although it binds issuers of significant ARTs and EMTs, reaching a non-significant issuer only where the national competent authority so requires. The two standards that would define the reserve itself have not been adopted. The EBA submitted final draft standards on the highly liquid financial instruments under Article 38(5) and on reserve liquidity under Article 36(4) in June 2024; the Commission signalled endorsement with amendments in August 2025, the EBA objected in October 2025, and neither has appeared in the Official Journal. Until they do, the operative test is the Regulation's own: reserve assets may be invested only in highly liquid financial instruments with minimal market, credit and concentration risk (Article 38(1)).

Liquidity stress testing is addressed by EBA guidelines under Article 45(8), which bear on issuers of significant tokens. The layer is still contested: in October 2025 the EBA published an opinion pushing back on Commission amendments to the reserve-liquidity standards, warning about liquidity risk and consistency with MiCA's prudential logic. For an issuer, the practical lesson is that reserve design is not a one-time authorisation exercise; the composition, custody and liquidity of the reserve are supervised against standards that are still being finalised.

A separate reporting strand runs alongside the reserve work: for ARTs and EMTs denominated in a non-EU official currency, the Article 22 reporting through which supervisors monitor use as a means of exchange runs on the templates in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2902, with the transaction-estimation methodology in Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/298.

Redemption rights and redemption plans

The holder's redemption right is the regime's centre of gravity, and it is not the same right for both tokens. An EMT holder may redeem at any time and at par value, free of charge (Article 49(4) and (6)), which is what lets an EMT function as electronic money. An ART holder has a right of redemption at all times (Article 39(1)), satisfied at the market value of the referenced assets or by delivering them (Article 39(2)), so the holder carries the market risk on those assets and may receive less than was paid. Issuer risk is a separate matter and is met by structure: the reserve is segregated from the issuer's creditors (Article 36(2)), fluctuations in the value of its investments fall on the issuer (Article 38(4)), and when the issuer cannot pay the holder's claim runs against the reserve itself (Article 39(1)).

Neither token may pay for being held: Articles 40 and 50 prohibit issuers, and crypto-asset service providers in relation to their services, from granting interest, and any remuneration or benefit tied to the length of time a holder holds the token, including net compensation or discounts with an equivalent effect, counts as interest. For an asset-referenced token used widely as a means of exchange, Article 23 adds a hard stop: where the estimated quarterly average within a single currency area exceeds one million transactions and EUR 200 million per day, the issuer must stop issuing and, within 40 working days, submit a plan to bring use back below the thresholds.

The EBA has built the machinery for stressed conditions: guidelines on recovery plans, for the issuer that can still be saved, and guidelines on redemption plans, for the orderly satisfaction of holders when it cannot. Authorisation files are judged on these documents, and a credible redemption plan has to survive the market conditions that would trigger it.

Tokens that grow large enough meet a further layer. Significance turns on the Article 43(1) criteria as specified in Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1506, applied under Articles 43 and 44 for ARTs and Articles 56 and 57 for EMTs. The consequences differ by token: an issuer of a significant ART carries on its activities under EBA supervision (Article 117(1)), whereas for a significant EMT whose issuer is an electronic money institution the EBA supervises compliance with Articles 55 and 58 only (Article 117(4)), the home authority otherwise remaining in place; a credit institution issuing a significant EMT is treated differently.

Own funds move as well. An ART issuer holds the highest of EUR 350,000, a percentage of the average reserve assets and a quarter of the preceding year's fixed overheads (Article 35(1)); significance raises that percentage from 2 to 3 per cent (Article 45(5)), which changes the requirement only where the reserve leg is the binding one, and the authority may add up to 20 per cent on risk grounds and 20 to 40 per cent on stress-test results (Article 35(3) and (5)). An electronic money institution ordinarily holds 2 per cent of average outstanding electronic money under Article 5 of Directive 2009/110/EC; once its token is significant, Article 58(1)(b) replaces that with the MiCA measure, 3 per cent of the average reserve assets under Article 45(5), together with the Article 35 uplifts.

The second licence: EMTs and payment services

An e-money token is, by design, electronic money, and moving electronic money for customers is regulated payments business. The EBA addressed the collision in its June 2025 opinion on the interplay between PSD2 and MiCA, coupled with a no-action letter giving national authorities and firms a transition, and in its opinion of 12 February 2026 it set out what national authorities should do as that transition ended on 2 March 2026: authorisation processes, the conditions under which EMT transactions may continue, and coordination between the two frameworks pending the PSD3 legislative alignment.

The subset is defined. Transferring EMTs on a client's instruction, and holding them in a wallet in the client's name that can send and receive from third parties, are payment services on the EBA's reading, and the February opinion adds that executing a transfer is one even where the wallet is no payment account and even where the client is paying itself; exchanging EMTs for funds or other crypto-assets, and intermediating a purchase paid in EMTs, are not. For a CASP inside that subset the question "do we also need a payment-services authorisation?" is a live supervisory expectation, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and the answer shapes group structure, capital and timelines. Firms that resolved it during the transition, by authorisation or by acting for an authorised payment institution, are onboarding clients; firms with an application still pending may continue only without marketing or new clients, and firms with neither are to cease and offboard.

Firms that did not resolve it face a second question alongside it, because the Article 143(3) transitional for crypto-asset service providers expired on 1 July 2026: under that provision, providers operating under national law before 30 December 2024 could continue only until 1 July 2026 or until authorisation was granted or refused, whichever came sooner, and member states could shorten or disapply the window. Serving EU clients without a MiCA authorisation, or without the Article 60 notification that lets a credit institution, an investment firm, an electronic money institution for its own tokens and a few other regulated entities provide crypto-asset services in place of one, is no longer a transitional position at all. Legacy issuers of asset-referenced tokens sit differently under Article 143(4), with no fixed calendar cut-off pending a decision on an application made before 30 July 2024.

What this means for you

• Classify formally, first. Run the ESAs' standardised test and document the result; every other obligation hangs on the label.
• Issuers: treat the reserve as a living system. Liquidity policy to Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1264 for significant tokens, or where your authority so requires; composition, custody and reserve liquidity to Articles 36 to 38 directly, because the Article 36(4) and Article 38(5) standards are still unadopted. Establish first whether you are an ART issuer, an electronic money institution issuing an ordinary EMT, a credit institution issuing one, or a significant-token issuer, because the reserve obligations are not the same.
• Write the redemption plan for stressed conditions. It is an authorisation document and a supervisory exhibit, and it will be read as one.
• CASPs handling EMTs: answer the PSD2 question now, and confirm the MiCA footing. That footing is a MiCA authorisation or, for the entities Article 60 lists, a completed notification. The EBA no-action transition ended on 2 March 2026 and the Article 143(3) grandfathering expired on 1 July 2026; your national authority expects a position on both.
• Groups spanning Switzerland: separate the analyses. MiCA does not apply in Switzerland, which treats stablecoins under its own FINMA framework; an EU token programme and a Swiss one are two regulatory projects.

Isak Legal advises issuers, crypto-asset service providers and fintechs on EU stablecoin regulation, MiCA authorisation strategy, the PSD2/MiCA interface and the parallel Swiss analysis. See our Digital Assets and Financial Regulation pages, or get in touch.

This client update is provided for general information only, reflects the position as at 26 September 2026 and does not constitute legal advice or create a lawyer-client relationship. The technical standards and supervisory positions cited are evolving; verify the current texts at the official sources linked above before acting. For advice on a specific matter, please contact us.