The European Central Bank and the European Union’s national central banks have urged Brussels to tighten stablecoin rules, asking lawmakers to keep the ban on stablecoin interest and extend it to the crypto lending and staking services that mimic it. In a response to the European Commission’s consultation on the MiCA review published September 22, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) said the payment of stablecoin remuneration “should continue to be prohibited,” and that attempts to circumvent the ban “through, for example, tri-party schemes must be addressed.”
Closing the interest loopholes
The ban should not stop at services covered by MiCA itself, the response argues, but should “apply also to unregulated services, such as crypto borrowing, lending and staking.” Some crypto platforms already engage in those activities, the central banks note, “thereby replicating the economic effect of interest payments through ancillary or unregulated services.” “Staking, lending and borrowing of crypto-assets should be regulated at Union level,” the response states, proposing a framework that separates agency services, investment services and banking-type activities. Stablecoin issuers are already pushing into those products, including Circle’s bitcoin-backed USDC borrowing.
Reworking how reserves are held
At the same time, the ESCB asked Brussels to scrap MiCA’s fixed minimum bank-deposit requirements — 30% of reserves for most issuers and 60% for significant ones — and replace them with liquidity rules tied to how quickly reserve assets can be turned into cash. The response proposes minimum shares of assets maturing within one and five working days, pointing to the European Banking Authority’s draft standards as a starting point. The shift would apply to the same stablecoin issuers now building regulated infrastructure across the EU.
New safeguards for foreign-currency stablecoins
The response also calls for “appropriate regulatory safeguards” against the growing use of non-euro stablecoins issued outside the EU, warning they pose risks to financial stability and the transmission of monetary policy. It presses for stronger supervision of large crypto firms, including moving oversight of all crypto-asset service providers to the European Securities and Markets Authority. The ESCB framed the demands around keeping central bank money as the anchor of the system, the same argument behind its Pontes tokenized settlement project.
The document is a recommendation to the European Commission rather than a change to MiCA itself; the consultation runs until September 30, and any legislative proposal would still need approval from EU lawmakers.
