A March 22, 2018 Reuters report put a concrete French cryptocurrency policy proposal before international markets: the government planned to let the Autorité des marchés financiers, or AMF, grant an optional visa to qualifying initial coin offerings and place approved issuers on a public “white list.”
The proposal was not yet law, an AMF authorization program or approval of any token. It was a policy commitment intended for France’s forthcoming Action Plan for Business Growth and Transformation, known as PACTE. Its significance lay in the approach France was considering—creating a dedicated route for token fundraising instead of either prohibiting ICOs or automatically forcing every offering into the existing public-securities regime.
Strict chronology matters. Reuters published its report on March 22. The underlying policy statement was an opinion article written by Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and published by Numerama on March 19 while he attended the Group of Twenty finance meeting in Buenos Aires. The event-day development was therefore the international reporting and clarification of an already stated French plan, not a new statute signed on March 22.
A proposed signal for token issuers
Le Maire said PACTE would give the AMF authority to grant a visa to token issuers that met criteria designed to protect savers. The resulting list was meant to help potential buyers distinguish projects that had passed regulatory review from the rest of the ICO market.
The minister did not provide complete eligibility rules in the statement. He described the planned framework as a way to clarify the law, attract innovation and address risks without obstructing the domestic blockchain sector. France had also asked former Banque de France deputy governor Jean-Pierre Landau to recommend broader approaches to crypto-asset regulation.
The contemplated visa was important because many ICO tokens did not fit comfortably within France’s existing legal categories. A token could represent access to a future service, governance rights or another contractual claim rather than a conventional share or bond. That diversity made a single classification difficult and left investors with inconsistent disclosures.
The AMF consultation behind the plan
The AMF had published its ICO consultation findings on February 22, 2018. It received 82 responses from individuals, digital-economy participants, finance professionals, academics and other interested parties. Among respondents expressing a preference among the regulator’s proposed approaches, nearly two-thirds supported new legislation tailored to ICOs.
Respondents broadly favored an information document describing the project, the rights attached to its tokens and the accounting treatment of funds raised. The consultation also found substantial support for identifying the responsible legal entity and founders, safeguarding collected assets, and applying controls against money laundering and terrorist financing.
Those findings supplied institutional groundwork for the planned visa, but they did not establish that every respondent agreed on the final design. Nor did consultation support make the proposal binding.
Why the timing mattered
France’s proposal emerged immediately after the March 19–20 G20 finance meeting. The official communiqué recognized potential benefits from the technology underlying crypto-assets while stating that crypto-assets lacked the principal attributes of sovereign currencies. It called for continued monitoring, implementation of applicable Financial Action Task Force standards and further assessment by international standard setters.
The French initiative occupied the national-policy space left open by that communiqué. Rather than waiting for a single global rulebook, France was signaling that it wanted a domestic disclosure and screening mechanism for token financing.
No event-day evidence established that the announcement caused a measurable cryptocurrency price move, attracted issuers to France or reduced investor losses. Its consequence was institutional: a major financial jurisdiction had outlined a bespoke, potentially permissive regulatory path while the G20 remained focused on monitoring and financial-crime controls.
Later context
On April 11, 2019, France’s National Assembly adopted the PACTE bill at its final reading. The resulting regime preserved the central concept discussed in March 2018: an optional AMF visa for eligible ICOs. That later enactment confirms the proposal’s direction but should not be projected backward as law already operating on March 22, 2018.
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