EU must fast-track tokenization under MiCA to match US and UK

ESMA’s executive director Natasha Cazenave highlighted tokenization as a key innovation at the “Capital Markets in the Digital Age” conference in Dubrovnik. She urged the EU to leverage the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) to keep pace with developments in the US and UK. Tokenization of real-world assets has the potential to broaden market access, reduce issuance costs and enable faster secondary trading, while embedding compliance and enabling real-time supervision. However, challenges such as illiquidity, interoperability and regulatory uncertainty remain. The global tokenized assets market, currently around $600 billion, is driven by platforms like Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood, and asset managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity. With the EU accounting for over half of tokenized fixed-income issuances in 2024, Cazenave stressed the need for a swift legal framework to improve transparency, cross-border efficiency and investor protection, ensuring the EU does not lag behind other Tier-1 jurisdictions.