The MiCA review wants influencers inside the rulebook. The paperwork is not ready.

The MiCA review, in one consultation response: what ESMA asked for on 30 September

A fox reads the paperwork before it reads the press release, so start at the den door. On 30 September 2026 the European Securities and Markets Authority published its answer to the European Commission's consultation on the MiCA review, a 16-page paper filed under reference ESMA75-113276571-1721, as the ESMA news release and the ESMA response paper show. The short version for anyone who sells, launches or promotes crypto in Europe: the regulator wants stricter rules for the marketing of crypto-assets, particularly when influencers and third parties promote them.

Note the verbs, because they carry the whole legal weight of the story. ESMA recommends, invites and proposes. It does not legislate. The Commission opened its consultations on 20 May 2026 and the public consultation closed on 31 August, according to TokenPost, and the consultation material is a working paper, not a formal proposal. The ESMA mica response is one voice in the MiCA review among several, and the European Banking Authority filed its own the same day, with a different centre of gravity: stablecoin schemes, token classification and crypto lending.

What happens next is written into the law itself. Article 140 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 requires the Commission to present a report on the application of MiCA by 30 June 2027, accompanied where appropriate by a legislative proposal. So the honest timeline is a report, then perhaps a proposal, then the long hedgerow of Parliament and Council negotiation. Nothing in this MiCA review changes a single line of your campaign brief today. Treat any headline that says otherwise as a rumour.

Here is the shape of the paper behind the MiCA review, compressed. Marketing sits beside five other asks in ESMA's paper: clearer token classification with binding ESMA opinions, an explicit ban on authorised firms serving non-compliant stablecoins, a narrower definition of what counts as fully decentralised, a new regulated service for firms that give clients access to DeFi, and tailored disclosure for staking, lending and borrowing, per the ESMA release. A law firm summary on Global Regulation Tomorrow lists the same headline items, including streamlined white paper notification and cost transparency.

Industry has begun to answer back in the MiCA review. Circle published its response on 1 October, and its summary concentrates on multi-issuance, equivalence for foreign stablecoins and reserve rules. It does not mention marketing at all, so the stablecoin reserve debate is loud while the marketing proposals travel through the undergrowth with far less noise.

Crypto marketing rules today: Article 7 and the gap ESMA wants closed

• 20 days

  working days of notice before a white paper publishes

• 5 days

  working days the register has to receive each notified paper

• 1

  non-binding classification opinion ESMA has issued so far

• 30 Jun 2027

  the date the Commission's MiCA report is due

To see what ESMA wants to tighten, read what already exists. Article 7 of MiCA governs marketing communications for crypto-assets other than asset-referenced and e-money tokens. Each one must be clearly identifiable as such, fair, clear and not misleading, and consistent with the white paper. It must say a white paper has been published, give the offeror's website address, a telephone number and an email address, and carry a prescribed statement that no competent authority has reviewed or approved it. No marketing communication may be disseminated before the white paper is published.

The white paper has its own discipline. Under Article 6, it must contain no assertions about the future value of the crypto-asset, and it must state plainly that the asset may lose its value in part or in full, may not always be transferable and may not be liquid. A mica white paper must also open with a statement on its first page that no authority has approved it, and it must be notified to the home regulator at least 20 working days before publication under Article 8. Crucially, Article 8 says competent authorities shall not require prior approval of white papers or the marketing around them.

Crypto-asset service providers carry a parallel duty. Article 66 requires them to give clients information that is fair, clear and not misleading, including in marketing communications, which must be identified as such, and bars them from deliberately or negligently misleading a client about the real or perceived advantages of any crypto-asset. Meanwhile Article 61 closes the easy exit for offshore firms: soliciting EU clients is not a service provided at the client's own initiative, regardless of the means of communication and notwithstanding any contractual disclaimer.

So where is the hole in the MiCA review? ESMA says it sits in the enforcement trail, not the text. Its paper states that MiCA's marketing provisions are very high level, which makes it difficult for national authorities to act, and that MiCA does not apply to influencers and third parties promoting crypto-assets on behalf of issuers and service providers at all. Where information is false or misleading, market abuse provisions apply. Where it is merely a recommendation or a prediction, the paper says MiCA offers supervisors no enforcement tools, per the ESMA response.

The remedy ESMA floats has three limbs. First, the Commission should reflect on banning or limiting certain marketing practices for certain types of crypto-assets, in line with the approach in MiFID II, and might explore conflict of interest disclosure or transparency of previous recommendations. Second, MiCA should introduce obligations for influencers and third parties, with matching powers for national authorities. Third, supervisors should get specific powers over third-country firms that actively solicit EU investors, so the Article 61 reverse solicitation exemption is read as narrowly as possible. We have traced the earlier enforcement mood in our pieces on who has cleared the MiCA gate and why a MiCA licence is now a distribution asset.

One honest caution about wording. ESMA invites the Commission to reflect on bans, and it names no list of banned techniques. If you read a headline promising a blacklist of influencer tactics, it has run ahead of the paper. The word to hold on to is clear prohibition of techniques proven to be particularly problematic, with the proof still to be assembled.

Mica white paper reform: a five-day register and what the records show

Launch copy lives or dies by the white paper, so this is the part of the MiCA review most likely to touch a growth lead's calendar. ESMA's diagnosis in section 4.1 is blunt. Offerors notify white papers to a national authority before publishing, then the authority has a five-working-day deadline to pass them into ESMA's register, which, in ESMA's words, makes a review of each white paper for basic compliance impractical. With no formal approval regime and no clear criteria for when a paper is duly notified, the paper warns of low-quality information reaching investors.

Its answer is administrative, not a new gate. ESMA recommends that the Commission clarify when a white paper counts as duly notified and centralise the notification process at ESMA, removing national authorities from the middle, per the ESMA response. The Commission has its own homework: Article 140 asks for an assessment of whether an approval mechanism for white papers is needed. Put those two together and the direction of travel in the MiCA review is a tidier, more checkable filing, with approval left as an open question.

The chart is built from the files ESMA publishes on its MiCA page, which says its register was last updated on 30 September 2026. We counted rows in the white paper file, the service provider file, the non-compliant entities file and the e-money token file, and found the asset-referenced token file holds only its header line. Records are not firms: ESMA says a withdrawn authorisation stays in the file with its end date, and one firm can appear more than once. Treat the counts as a fair scent of scale, not a census.

Two details deserve a second look. The service provider file holds 364 records, and only two of them carry an end date. The non-compliant entities file, which lists firms that provide crypto services without the licence MiCA requires, holds 173. That second number is the one a marketer should memorise, because each entry is a firm a national authority has formally flagged. Our look at how regulators started reading funnels explains why an affiliate network can end up on the wrong side of such a list.

The bars show the four largest home states among the white paper records, again our count of the register file. For a launch team the practical reading is unglamorous. If the Commission accepts centralised filing, the notification route you use today could change, and the 20 working days you build into a launch plan could change with it. We would not rewrite a timeline for that yet. We would keep the filing dates, the version of the paper that was notified and every marketing claim that quotes it in a single place, because MiCA already requires the published paper and marketing to match the version notified, per Article 9 of the regulation.

Influencers, affiliates and creator deals: what the proposed crypto marketing rules would mean

Now the part the growth lead asked about. Suppose the MiCA review lands as ESMA hopes: suppose the Commission takes ESMA's marketing recommendation and a proposal follows. The first practical change would be the end of a comfortable fiction: that an influencer or affiliate is outside the regulation because the issuer's own website is compliant. ESMA says MiCA currently does not apply to them, and proposes obligations plus supervisory powers precisely to reach them, as the response paper sets out.

We read that as three live exposures for a crypto marketer. Creator deals, where a paid post sells a token or a service the creator does not own. Affiliate programmes, where a network's sub-affiliates write their own copy on your behalf. And launch copy, where a white-paper-led announcement drifts from the white paper. In each case the brief, not the ad, is the document a regulator would ask for. Our earlier piece on the New York investigation into crypto influencers and the FCA settlement that targeted the posts, not the exchange show the same logic arriving by other roads.

The cost-claims row deserves its own mention, because it is pure marketing. ESMA says some service providers advertise zero commission and tight spreads when the spread applied is in fact high enough to recoup, or exceed, the lost commission. It proposes that firms providing execution and exchange services give full cost information to clients. If you write headline offers for an exchange, the zero fee line is the first sentence a supervisor would read twice.

So what is cheap to do before anyone legislates? Our shortlist is practical and entirely optional. Give every paid voice a written brief that names the claims they may make and the risks they must show. Keep an approved-wording library for the white paper's core statements, so no creator improvises a promise about returns. Put a disclosure clause and a takedown clause in every creator and affiliate contract, with a named person who can order a post removed within a day. And archive each live post with its date, because the day a regulator asks what you said, a screenshot is a poor witness.

None of that is exotic. It is the same discipline we bring to Web3 marketing and fintech marketing, and it pays whether the Commission acts or not, because Article 7 already demands fair, clear and not misleading copy. Our note on selling what works, never what pays makes the American version of the same point.

Mica defi, staking and lending: the disclosure your copy will have to carry

Marketing rules in the MiCA review do not stop at influencers. They reach the product pages of anything that earns, routes or lends. On mica defi, ESMA reports divergent views on what full decentralisation means in Recital 22 and warns of decentralisation washing, where an identifiable operator relies on DeFi-type language to avoid MiCA obligations. It asks the Commission to write a clear, narrow definition into the text, or alternatively to let ESMA issue guidelines, per the response paper.

The companion proposal is a new regulated service. Where an authorised crypto-asset service provider offers a technical interface to DeFi protocols, routes transactions or acts as an intermediary between clients and decentralised services, ESMA would treat it as a gatekeeper. Its obligations would include disclosure of DeFi risks, transparency about protocol selection and routing, conflict management, due diligence on the protocols offered and operational safeguards, kept proportionate to the control the firm exercises. The paper adds that open-source development, self-custody and permissionless infrastructure should not automatically count as regulated intermediation.

Why does that matter to a copywriter? Because a wallet or exchange that says it simply connects you to decentralised markets would be describing a regulated activity, and the word simply would have to survive scrutiny. A page that says earn, swap or access should be able to show who chooses the protocol, who profits from the routing and what can go wrong. Our earlier read of stablecoin yield and the Binance and Circle arrangement shows how quickly a yield line becomes a distribution question.

Staking is where ESMA names marketing outright. Its paper says marketing materials may emphasise staking rewards while downplaying the risks, and lists the disclosures it wants from authorised providers: rewards, lock-up and unbonding periods, slashing risk, validator selection, fees, operational dependencies and insolvency treatment. On lending, it calls current programmes black boxes for clients and wants written consent and disclosure, though it does not propose a new authorised service for lending. A mica defi or staking product page that already answers those eight questions in plain words has little to fear.

There is a final, sober point about the MiCA review. The wider review also raises stablecoin and lending questions that the European Banking Authority and others are pressing, so marketing is one thread in a thick thicket of proposals. Some will be diluted, some dropped and some rewritten by Parliament. The fox that prowls with patience reads each draft as it arrives, keeps its claims substantiated, and does not outfox itself by betting on a single outcome. If you want a second pair of eyes on a launch brief, our Web3 marketing team and our SEO and GEO service sit at the same table.

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