The President of the ECB called for the development of additional regulations for the supervision of cryptocurrencies

After the collapse of the FTX exchange, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, again called for the development of MiCA 2, additional rules for regulating the activities of cryptocurrency companies.

Christine Lagarde raised this question back in June, amid rising inflation. She stated the need for additional MiCA 2 regulations that would govern staking. On Monday, November 28, Lagarde again returned to the discussion of this issue at a hearing in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament. She is convinced that after the collapse of the FTX exchange, tougher oversight of cryptocurrencies has become an absolute necessity.

Lagarde remembered the Libra project, which was created by the social giant Facebook and was later renamed Diem. The ECB was against the launch of the Diem stablecoin, believing that it would become a serious threat to the global financial system. As for the situation with FTX, this is not about stablecoins, but about crypto assets in general, which implies even more risks. According to Lagarde, the ECB could become the international regulator of digital assets.

“At least Europe is ahead of the rest in crypto regulation. However, steps need to be taken in the right direction. Additional MiCA 2 regulations are needed to regulate the cryptocurrency industry more broadly,” Lagarde said.

Earlier, a member of the Economics Committee of the European Parliament, Stefan Berger, one of the supporters of the MiCA concept, also called for the speedy regulation of crypto assets. According to Berger, the FTX incident showed the dangers of an unregulated crypto market and marketplaces operating without licenses. There are a large number of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) whose concept is not clear, so MiCA solves this problem. If MiCA provisions had been followed internationally, FTX would not have collapsed, Berger said.

In early November, Christine Lagarde announced that the European Commission was working on a bill that would make the digital euro, if launched, legal tender.