In brief
- ESMA’s 2027 work programme, published on 28 September 2026, moves its MiCA work from writing rules to checking how national regulators supervise licensed crypto firms.
- Focus areas are operational resilience, real EU presence and outsourcing, liquidity, reverse solicitation and how crypto assets are classified.
- Trading platforms face a 31 December 2027 deadline to have a white paper for the crypto assets they list, and the European Commission’s MiCA review is due by June 2027.
Europe’s markets regulator is shifting its crypto work from writing rules to checking how they are applied. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) set out its crypto plans for next year in its 2027 Annual Work Programme, published on 28 September. ESMA does not license crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) itself. National regulators do that, and ESMA’s job is to make them supervise in the same way.
ESMA Chair Verena Ross told the European Parliament’s economic affairs committee the same day that the work had moved “from rulemaking towards supervision and convergence,” Cointelegraph reported.
What supervisors will look at
The programme lists the areas where ESMA wants national regulators to act alike: a CASP’s digital operational resilience, whether it keeps enough real staff and functions inside the EU, outsourcing risk, liquidity in EU crypto markets, reverse solicitation, and the classification of crypto assets. Reverse solicitation is the exemption that lets a non-EU firm serve an EU client who approached it first.
ESMA also plans to harmonise the periodic reports CASPs send to their national regulator and to promote shared risk indicators and dashboards. It will check whether regulators have applied the recommendations of its 2025 fast-track peer review on CASP licensing, and publish a final report on the custody review it launched in June 2026, which tests how licensed custodians protect private keys and handle incidents. On anti-money laundering, it will work with the new EU authority AMLA on CASPs’ AML and KYC checks.
Deadlines firms should note
Two dates stand out. The transition period for trading platforms to make sure a crypto-asset white paper exists for what they list ends on 31 December 2027, and ESMA will prepare supervisors for it during the year. The European Commission is also due to report on how MiCA is working by June 2027, and ESMA will feed its experience into that review and any law change that follows.
On market abuse, the first phase of MIDAS, ESMA’s central surveillance system for crypto trading, will be fully running by 2027. A second phase with more analytics and more data types needs board approval first.
The crypto plan sits beside a wider change. On 23 September ESMA said it would add digital innovation as an EU-wide supervisory priority from 2027, starting with how supervised firms use AI and tokenisation. It runs next to the cyber and operational resilience priority that has applied since 2025.
Sources
- ESMA, Annual Work Programme 2027 (28 Sep 2026)
- ESMA, “ESMA sets 2027 priorities for stronger, simpler and more integrated EU capital markets” (28 Sep 2026)
- ESMA, “ESMA sets new supervisory priority on digital innovation from 2027” (23 Sep 2026)
- Cointelegraph, MiCA focus shifts from rulemaking to supervision, ESMA chair says (28 Sep 2026)
