On 2 June 2022, Regulation 2022/858/EU (the “DLT Regulation“) was published in the Official Journal of the European Union, introducing a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology.
The DLT Regulation, effective from 23 March 2023, is part of the EU Digital finance package initiative – a legislative package on digital finance adopted on 24 September 2020 by the European Commission – which includes significant interventions in the area of digital resilience, with the aim of digitising financial services, stimulating innovation and competition between different competitors in the European Union.
Alongside the DLT Regulation, the European institutions are currently at work with the proposed regulation on the crypto-asset market (Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation; the “Mi.Ca”) and the regulation on the digital resilience of technology solutions in the financial sector (Digital Operational Resilience Act; the “DORA”), to implement rules and ensure security standards and to monitor ICT providers operating in the sector.
The DLT Regulation creates a regulatory system for platform operators in the trading of DLT financial instruments, namely “financial instruments issued, recorded, transferred and stored using distributed ledger technology” interchanged on platforms based on blockchain technology.
The pilot regime should foster new opportunities for efficiency gains in the trading and post-trading process, without weakening the safeguards applicable to traditional market infrastructures. To this end, the DLT Regulation pursues the principles of proportionality, technological neutrality, a level playing field to ensure the protection of personal data and allows access also to new operators.
Regulation 2022/858/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology, and amending Regulations (EU) No 600/2014 and (EU) No 909/2014 and Directive 2014/65/EU