MiCA's technical standards: the index that does not exist

Reference · European Union

MiCA does not work on its own. The Regulation empowers ESMA and the EBA to write technical standards and guidelines filling in what it leaves at principle level, and a firm cannot answer "what must I actually do?" from the Level 1 text alone.

There is no consolidated public index of those measures. They arrive piecemeal — regulatory standards paired with implementing standards instrument by instrument, spread across ESMA, the EBA and the Commission, published on three different websites over two years. Practitioners assemble their own lists and those lists disagree.

This one is derived from the Regulation rather than compiled from other people's lists. Every row was found by searching the text of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 for the empowering formulas — "shall develop draft regulatory technical standards", "shall develop draft implementing technical standards", "shall issue guidelines" — and attributed to the article it sits in. Forty-one empowerments, Articles 6 to 109.

In summary

• 41 empowerments: 25 regulatory technical standards, 9 implementing technical standards, 7 sets of guidelines.
• Most are joint. The Regulation tasks the EBA and ESMA together in 32 of the 41; ESMA alone in 5, the EBA alone in 4.
• The Level 2 framework is not finished. Nine adopted instruments are identified below, against 41 mandates. That gap is partly incomplete adoption and partly the absence of any single authoritative list — the two cannot be separated from outside.
• MiCA's own deadline for most submissions was 30 June 2024. Sixteen of the empowerments carry it. It tells you when ESMA and the EBA had to deliver drafts, not when the Commission had to adopt them.

How to read the two columns

The mandate columns — article, type, developer, subject, deadline — come from the Regulation. They are complete, in the sense that every empowerment in the text is here.

The adopted as column is weaker, and the index says so on its face rather than presenting a uniform table. It is assembled from the Commission's register of delegated and implementing acts and from the Official Journal. A blank does not mean "not adopted" — it means no adopted measure was identified here. Anyone who needs certainty on a specific standard should check EUR-Lex for that article before relying on a blank.

That asymmetry is the honest shape of the problem. It is also why building the index from the Regulation matters: the mandate list cannot drift, because it is fixed in the Level 1 text, whereas any list of adopted acts is a snapshot the moment it is written.

What the pattern shows

The white paper is the most heavily specified object in the Regulation. Articles 6, 19 and 51 each carry a paired RTS and ITS — content and methodology in the regulatory standard, forms and templates in the implementing one — for the three white-paper regimes: crypto-assets generally, asset-referenced tokens, and e-money tokens. If a firm is issuing rather than servicing, that is where the detail lives.

Authorisation is specified twice over. Article 18 for asset-referenced token issuers and Article 62 for crypto-asset service providers each carry an RTS on the information required and an ITS on the forms. The application pack a practitioner assembles is shaped by those instruments, not by Article 62(2) alone.

Cooperation carries more standards than conduct. Articles 95, 96 and 107 — cooperation between competent authorities, with the European supervisory authorities, and with third countries — account for five empowerments. The supervisory plumbing was specified early and in detail.

Only three empowerments belong to ESMA alone on the service-provider side: Article 68 governance, Article 76 trading platforms, and Article 92 market abuse. Those are the standards a CASP is most likely to meet in an assessment. Two of the three have identified adopted instruments — record-keeping under Article 68 and market abuse under Article 92. Article 76, the trading-platform standard, does not, which is worth knowing if the permission set includes operating a venue.

Sources

• Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 (MiCA) — the empowerments, extracted from the OJ text on 24 August 2026
• European Commission — implementing and delegated acts under MiCA — the adoption status
• ESMA — MiCA policy documents and the EBA's MiCA pages, for the final reports underlying each standard

Related: building the permission set and the application, phase by phase.

Reference material, not legal advice. The mandate list is derived from the Regulation and is complete; the adoption status is a snapshot of 24 August 2026 and a blank means not identified, not not adopted. The information provided is for research and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.