The European Parliament's economic affairs committee, known as ECON, has called on the European Commission to examine whether decentralized finance, staking, NFTs and crypto lending should be brought under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. CoinMarketCap reported the committee's position on June 29, 2026. The move opens a debate over the parts of the crypto market that MiCA, the EU's flagship rulebook, currently leaves mostly untouched.
MiCA took effect in stages through 2024 and 2025 and set licensing rules for stablecoin issuers and crypto-asset service providers across the 27-member bloc. It deliberately carved out fully decentralized services, treated most NFTs as outside its core perimeter, and left staking and lending without a dedicated framework. The committee's request targets exactly those gaps.
Four corners the current rulebook skips
Each of the four areas named by ECON sits in a different relationship to the existing text.
DeFi was excluded from MiCA on the basis that a service with no identifiable intermediary is hard to license or hold accountable. The regulation's own recitals flagged decentralized finance as a topic for a later review rather than a settled question. Staking and lending, by contrast, are often run by centralized exchanges and custodians that already hold MiCA authorization for other activities, yet the yield products themselves are not governed by a specific EU standard. NFTs occupy a middle ground: MiCA exempts genuinely unique tokens but still applies where collections behave like fungible, tradeable instruments.
Asking the Commission to assess all four at once signals that lawmakers see the carve-outs as a coherent set of loose ends rather than isolated exceptions.
A request to study, not a rule yet
The distinction matters. The committee has not passed a binding amendment. It has urged the Commission to produce an assessment, which is the formal trigger for any future legislative proposal. MiCA was always built with a scheduled review, and the Commission is required to report back to Parliament and Council on whether the framework needs widening. ECON's intervention pushes DeFi, staking, lending and NFTs to the front of that queue.
A study can take months, and any resulting legislation would then run through the full EU process of Commission drafting, Parliament debate and Council negotiation. For now, the practical rules for an EU resident staking through an exchange or borrowing against crypto have not changed.
Stakes for everyday EU crypto users
The four areas under review are not abstract. Staking and yield products are how many holders earn a return on assets they also spend, and crypto lending lets users borrow against a balance instead of selling it. Both feed directly into the funding side of crypto cards and wallets across Germany and the rest of the single market. If the Commission moves to license these activities, providers may need to add disclosures, capital buffers or eligibility checks, which can change who qualifies and at what cost.
The DeFi question carries the sharpest edge. Bringing genuinely decentralized protocols under a licensing regime would test whether EU rules can attach to software with no company behind it. Users who spend from their own wallet and interact with on-chain markets directly would feel any new compliance layer most. Some protocols could geofence EU access rather than seek authorization, a pattern already seen when other jurisdictions tightened DeFi oversight.
NFTs are the lowest-stakes item for most spenders, but a clearer line on when a collection counts as a financial instrument would affect marketplaces and the platforms that let users buy them.
A pattern of EU tightening
The request lands during a stretch of active EU rulemaking. Brussels has been advancing a digital euro toward a parliamentary path, and firms such as Ripple have been securing MiCA authorization to operate bloc-wide. Against that backdrop, a move to widen MiCA's reach fits a clear direction: the EU is closing perimeter gaps rather than loosening them.
Whether the Commission agrees that DeFi, staking, NFTs and lending need their own rules, and how aggressively it draws the lines, will shape the next phase of European crypto policy. The committee has set the question. The answer now sits with the Commission's assessment.
Overview
The EU Parliament's economic affairs committee asked the European Commission on June 29, 2026 to assess whether DeFi, staking, NFTs and crypto lending should fall under MiCA, the four areas the regulation currently leaves largely outside its core scope. The request is a call to study, not a binding rule, and any change would still run through the full EU legislative process. For users, the areas in play touch yield, borrowing and on-chain access that connect to how crypto cards and wallets are funded across the bloc.
