The National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) is preparing to begin regulating crypto assets at the end of this year, and warns that it will not be an easy task. For now, it will hire 76 workers this year to incorporate them as of January 2025 and form a new supervision area. It is equivalent to increasing the workforce by 17%, standing, according to the organization’s latest annual report, at 436 people.
The MiCa community regulation, which is how the new regulation for cryptocurrencies is known, “is the most relevant project for 2024 and 2025,” said the president of the CNMV, Rodrigo Buenaventura, yesterday in the presentation of the supervisor’s annual activity plan. . “It is the priority and affects all areas of the house,” he said. “It is closely linked to new hires,” which will also include people to serve the new cybersecurity competencies, known as Dora.
At the end of the year, the CNMV will create the first registry of cryptoasset entities and will launch a manual on how to request authorization to market these products. He also wants to conduct a survey among entities, conventional or not, to gauge their interest in digital currencies.
For the president of the CNMV, one of the challenges will be to convey to society that the regulation of cryptoassets will not reduce their speculative and volatile nature. “They will be regulated in December, but they are still high-risk and complex products. We want to distinguish a crypto asset from a financial asset,” he stated.
The new regulation, applicable in Europe, is in certain aspects ahead of the American one, although it does not yet include bitcoin-traded funds, recently approved by the SEC for application on Wall Street. “In Spain there are already certain products of this type accessible to institutional investors, but fortunately their weight is lower,” he indicated.
For Buenaventura, the EU “has done well” in regulating cryptocurrencies, although the CNMV has raised at least a couple of objections. The first is that “the debate in Europe was launched before the fall of FTX, when the perception of risk was lower.” The second, “that there should not be the confusion of thinking that, since it is regulated, it has less risk.”
The CNMV is also working with the Bank of Spain and the Government on an analysis of the use of generative artificial intelligence in market operations, to understand “the possible risks to financial stability.”
These initiatives are part of the 42 new specific objectives presented yesterday by the supervisor for this year. The major actions also have to do with the fight against ‘eco-laundering’ or ‘greenwashing’, or carrying out an analysis on the presence of women in the management bodies of the supervised entities.
