MiCA's review asks the hard questions. Korea's Digital Asset Basic Act should answer them too

Once the National Assembly settles its committee line-up after the June 2026 local elections, work on the Digital Asset Basic Act should resume and the financial authorities are expected to table their own bill. The task for the second half is to merge the bills and fill their gaps.

The European Commission has just offered a useful reference: its targeted consultation on the review of MiCA, open from 20 May to 31 August 2026. MiCA is a dense regime of 149 articles and more than 30 technical standards, yet a year and a half of operation has exposed issues worth fixing.

What the EU is asking

On tokens in general, whether to restrict marketing of high-risk, speculative crypto assets to retail investors, and whether founders' and early investors' tokens should be locked up or vested, echoing the US CLARITY Act.

On stablecoins, whether to allow interest or rewards under conditions (MiCA bans them today), whether banks should issue only through a separate legal entity as under the GENIUS Act, whether holding 30 to 60 per cent of reserves as EU bank deposits is right, how to handle reserves in a crisis under multi-issuance across jurisdictions, and whether redemption rights should be limited to EU holders.

The licensing overlap Korea shares

The consultation also asks about crypto service providers that offer payment services with e-money tokens. In June 2025 the European Banking Authority said the overlap between PSD2 and MiCA creates legal uncertainty and double authorisation, and proposed clarifying that exchanging a stablecoin is not a payment service, reusing MiCA filings where a PSD2 licence is needed, and in the long run strengthening MiCA to avoid a separate licence.

Korea faces the same question: whether a firm offering stablecoin payments needs both a payment gateway licence under the Electronic Financial Transactions Act and a digital asset licence. The EU's answer will be a useful guide.