EU finance ministers back €300bn per-infrastructure DLT Pilot Regime cap; Lagarde objects

EU finance ministers backed raising the DLT Pilot Regime cap to €300 billion per DLT market infrastructure, three times the €100 billion the European Commission proposed. The Council of the EU agreed the main elements of its negotiating position on the market integration and supervision package (MISP) on Friday, Ledger Insights reported. The regime is the EU framework that supports tokenization.

The limit in force is €6 billion, making the Council's figure 50 times the current cap; ministers also want the option of a later increase to €500 billion through a Commission delegated act.

Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart and many others lobbied for the DLT Pilot caps to be dropped entirely, according to Ledger Insights.

ECB President Christine Lagarde objected to the higher figure and urged Parliament to revisit it, warning that DLT structures risk not being interoperable and could reintroduce fragmentation.

Ledger Insights suggested her warning may nod to access and linkage rules in the Central Securities Depositories Regulation, from which DLT Pilot Regime infrastructures are allowed some exemptions.

A related MISP plan would allow DLT-based settlement schemes run by groups of banks, functioning like a decentralized CSD.

The Commission proposed a €10 billion cap for those schemes; the Council raised it to €50 billion, which Ledger Insights calls the minimum suggested by industry group AFME.

On crypto and MiCA, the Council wants only significant crypto asset service providers supervised by ESMA at the EU level, leaving other CASPs with national authorities.

Because the Council's text is a negotiating position rather than final law, the €300 billion figure is not settled, and Parliament is the body Lagarde has asked to reconsider it.