A group of 40 financial and technology companies has written a formal letter to the European Commission, Council and European Parliament, sending an urgent message: “Europe needs an agile regulatory framework for the tokenization of assets (RWA) or it will lose out to global competition.”
For this reason, these companies say they are calling for regulations regarding digital assets to be separated from general financial packages to avoid bureaucratic delays. They are threatening to postpone the legal definition until the end of the year.
The letter, signed by major companies such as Nasdaq, Borse Stuttgart Group, Danske Bank, Spain’s Alastria and STX (of Bit2Me), points out that the current “trial run” of distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure has resulted in a “glass ceiling”. According to the companies, the technical and temporal limitations of current regulations include: These prevent the region from competing with recent regulatory and commercial activities in the United States.
In this sense, the private sector warns that the European legislative process is too slow for the speed of industry. While the European Union is debating a complex package that would include oversight by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), in the United States the administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are pushing for a networked capital market using distributed ledger technology similar to the one that underpins Bitcoin.
At this point, it is important to explain that RWA is traditional real-world assets (real estate, government bonds, gold, stocks, banknotes, etc.) that are tokenized or converted into digital tokens on a distributed ledger network commonly known as blockchain. This allows for faster, more transparent, and more accessible ways to buy, sell, split, or spend currencies within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, especially DeFi.
Among the key technical requests submitted by the consortium is the removal of restrictions on eligible asset classes. Currently, the legal framework restricts the issuance of digital shares to companies with a market capitalization of less than 500 million euros. This barrier requires the industry to break down in order to attract large emitters.
Similarly, the companies are proposing to raise the global limit on the amount of processing assets from the current €9 billion to between €100 billion and €150 billion. Another fundamental demand is the removal of the temporary nature of the license, which currently expires in six years, which Spanish media Cinco Díaz reports claims will create legal uncertainty and drive away long-term institutional investors.
However, despite lobbying from businesses, questions persist from the public sector about the robustness of infrastructure. Piero Cipollone, member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB), pointed out that: Operational fragmentation is one of the biggest brakes on the ecosystem. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the official said that the fact that multiple networks operate in isolation prevents the financial system from leveraging economies of scale and increases integration costs.
In line with this, Cipollone also warns of a related financial hurdle: the lack of public settlement assets. The ECB believes that in the absence of a fully functional digital euro, markets will rely on private digital assets and corporate-issued stablecoins, which pose credit risks and volatility that central bank money does not have.
This move by the 40 companies comes in a context where tokenization is seen as a major reconfiguration of traditional financial infrastructure. Projects like Deutsche Börse, which has invested $200 million to expand its digital asset offering, and the efforts of Spain’s Bit2Me. These indicate that the industry is ready to operate under a 24/7 instant payment model.
The industry concludes that without immediate legislative intervention to provide clarity by the end of 2026, Europe risks ceding technological and financial sovereignty to more agile jurisdictions. Implementation of an independent “rapid solution” is presented as a minimum requirement for the Old Continent Don’t lose the race to the expansion of tokenized capital markets in the US.
(Tag translation) Cryptocurrency
