The European Union’s (EU) Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) was a hot topic of conversation during the Paris Blockchain Week from 8-10 April 2025. Industry leaders like Fireblocks Chief Legal Compliance Officer Jason Allegrante and OpenPayd CEO Iana Dimitrova weighed in too.
Talking about MiCA from a “service provider’s perspective” Allegrante said, “With MiCA, we’re obviously seeing a migration for companies in the Eurozone, many of which were formerly unregulated. They’re moving from an unregulated environment to one where there are significant compliance obligations. As a service provider, that challenge is an opportunity for us at Fireblocks.”
MiCA marks significant progress for the crypto industry, but stablecoin restrictions require reevaluation. Fireblocks’ Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, Jason Allegrante, discusses the need to revisit caps on stablecoin issuance and transactions.
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Furthermore, talking about the EU’s recently adopted Regulation on Digital Operational Resilience (DORA), alongside MiCA, Allegrante said, “The other part of this has been interesting for us and as much of a journey for us as it has been for our clients and customers – is DORA. So, if you become a CASP under MiCA, you are also subject to DORA. And DORA is basically a heightened set of standards around a selection of service providers. This also applies to financial institutions in the Eurozone. So what was interesting about the DORA journey is that if we want to provide services – as I said we do, to this community of CASPs, financial institutions – it meant Fireblocks would have to go through a process of re-evaluation itself.”
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Allegrante Throws Light On DORA
He continued, “So we’re a security-first company. That doesn’t mean we assume the product is perfect. It’s more of a commitment to improve the product over time. So we do things like run a bug bounty program, and we do pen testing, and we do audits. This is all because we assume there’s some probability that the product can be improved. And this is exactly the journey we went through going through our first DORA audit.”
“It was probably less on the technical side that we found areas for improvement,” he said, “but we were really challenged in our assumptions around what the customer service model should look like. There are things like information disclosures, access rights, all sorts of stuff that basically govern, dictate your relationship with the customer. And how open and transparent you can be. That’s really where we saw that we could improve coming out of the first DORA audit. And really to both of those points, what we did at Fireblocks was we transformed our learnings and and our understanding of the regulations here into new product packages.”
“We have a bundling of existing services which is really responsive to MiCA.”
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Meanwhile, CEO Of Payments Business OpenPayd Thinks MiCA Is “Fairly Straightforward”
About a year ago, OpenPayd started its process of applying for the first virtual financial asset license in Europe. The company then went through the process of upgrading to MiCA.
“And the practical experience of it, I think is probably going to be quite different to someone that comes from the crypto side of things,” said Dimitrova. “For us the experience was fairly straightforward, because we already have the muscle that is required in terms of compliance and regulation.”
“I think if you do not necessarily have that (compliance and regulation) in terms of institutional muscle, institutional experience and knowledge, it could be actually quite difficult to get on top of MiCA when it comes to a number of requirements – when it comes to governance, when it comes to board compositions, when it comes to committee compositions, decision making, generally speaking – the conduct of business, requirements around safeguarding and and reserves. So, for us, the experience has been, I would say, very positive and fairly straightforward. I wouldn’t say very, very straightforward because it did come with challenges. But I think this is because, and exactly because we’re coming from many years of being heavily regulated across multiple jurisdictions.”
Key Takeaways
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“The other part of this has been interesting for us and as much of a journey for us as it has been for our clients and customers – is DORA. So, if you become a CASP under MiCA, you are also subject to DORA,” said Fireblocks Chief Legal Compliance Officer Jason Allegrante.
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Industry leaders point out that MiCA doesn’t say anything about auditing. All the all the rules are in DORA.
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