French regulators seek MiCA duties for platforms opening DeFi access

France’s Treasury and three financial regulators have proposed making regulated crypto platforms responsible for additional checks when they give customers access to decentralized-finance protocols. Published October 21, the joint submission calls for due diligence, continuing monitoring, protocol certification and clearer platform liability.

The proposal matters because it offers a practical route for extending European safeguards into DeFi without treating every autonomous protocol as a conventional financial company. It would put many of the obligations on the identifiable crypto-asset service providers that connect customers to protocols.

Nothing changed legally when the document was published. The submission responds to the European Commission’s review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA. The Commission may eventually recommend legislation, but France’s position is neither an amendment nor an enforceable rule.

Platforms would become DeFi gatekeepers

The French Treasury, Autorité des Marchés Financiers, Banque de France and prudential regulator ACPR said intermediaries should have clearly assigned responsibilities when facilitating DeFi access. According to the joint proposal, platforms would assess protocols before making them available and continue monitoring relevant risks afterward.

Contemporaneous reporting on the submission says the contemplated review would examine matters such as smart-contract vulnerabilities, audits and prior incidents, governance, liquidity, price-oracle dependencies, bridges and exposure to illicit activity. The authorities also support independent certification for protocols and smart contracts.

Liability would depend on how actively a platform facilitated access and whether it performed adequate checks, rather than automatically making the platform responsible for every protocol failure. The submission leaves an important boundary unresolved: responsibility for assets after users deposit them into a protocol still requires further clarification from European authorities.

That distinction is central to the proposal. A platform that selects, integrates or promotes a protocol has a more direct role than a developer publishing a general-purpose wallet or a user interacting independently with public code. France’s approach therefore focuses on regulated access points while preserving a separate category for services that are genuinely decentralized.

The proposal reaches beyond DeFi

The French authorities also want a stronger role for the European Securities and Markets Authority in supervising significant crypto service providers and crypto conglomerates. They propose clarifying MiCA’s boundaries with securities and payment law, particularly when tokenized financial activity could otherwise require overlapping authorizations.

Stablecoins are another priority. The submission supports euro-denominated e-money tokens and tokenized bank deposits but seeks an explicit prohibition on EU-authorized platforms providing services involving stablecoins that do not meet MiCA requirements. It also proposes a framework for stablecoins issued fungibly inside and outside the EU, with equivalence assessments, supervisory cooperation and additional protections for reserves and redemption rights.

France further asks the Commission to clarify the treatment of staking, crypto lending and borrowing. These activities are not interchangeable: staking concerns participation in network validation or related services, while lending and borrowing create credit and counterparty exposures. A future framework would need to distinguish those functions rather than regulating them under a single label.

Brussels controls the next step

The Commission opened its targeted MiCA consultation on May 20 and closed it on September 30. It said the responses would inform a mandated assessment of MiCA’s application and market developments. That report may be accompanied by a legislative proposal if the Commission concludes that changes are warranted.

France’s October 21 publication is therefore an agenda-setting document, not the final European position. Other EU authorities and industry groups have submitted their own recommendations, and any binding amendment would require the formal EU legislative process.

For platforms, protocol developers and users, the immediate takeaway is limited but material: influential French authorities want regulated intermediaries to carry more responsibility when they open a pathway into DeFi. The eventual scope, liability standard, certification system and treatment of direct wallet access remain unsettled.