The European Commission is running a targeted consultation on the review of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, the regulation on markets in crypto-assets known as MiCA. It opened on 20 May 2026 and, according to the Commission's consultation page, it closes on 30 September 2026 at 23:59 Central European Summer Time. The fourth part of the consultation document contains a section on prediction markets, and inside that section sits a question with no answer options at all. It asks what substantive requirements should apply to the firms that run these venues.
That is not a rhetorical question. It is a blank field in a form that closes in about three weeks, and the answers collected in it feed a report the Commission owes to the European Parliament and the Council. This piece is about what is actually in that section, why it is easy to walk past, and what an answer worth filing would contain. We are not neutral about the outcome. We want these markets to exist, and we think the version that survives the next round of rulemaking is the one whose operators wrote down the standard before anyone demanded it.
Prediction markets are filed under what the regulation does not cover
Section 4.4 of the consultation document is titled "Prediction markets and perpetual futures". It does not sit in the parts dealing with crypto-asset classification or with service provider authorisation. It sits in Part 4, which the Commission titles "Policy areas beyond the current scope of MiCA", described in the document as areas that are not directly regulated by MiCA today.
The placement is a statement in itself. The Commission is not asking how the existing MiCA machinery applies to prediction markets. It is asking whether a perimeter should be drawn around them at all, and if so, where. That is a wider question than the one most operators have been preparing for, and it is wider than the one the classification analysis answers.
It is also not the whole picture, because a venue can be outside MiCA and inside something else at the same time. On 3 July 2026 ESMA published a public statement (reference ESMA35-243228190-8148, announced here) confirming that event contracts meeting the definition of a financial instrument fall under the national product intervention measures on binary options in every EU member state. We went through what that means for token-shaped venues in our piece on the third EU rulebook. The short version is that "beyond the current scope of MiCA" does not mean unregulated. It means the rules that reach you were written for something else.
The paragraph that lists what is in Part 4 leaves section 4.4 out
The consultation document opens with a roadmap. Each part gets a sentence telling the reader what is inside it, so that respondents can decide which parts concern them. For Part 4 that sentence says the part consists of questions relating to decentralised finance, crypto-asset staking, lending and borrowing activities, and non-fungible tokens, and that it also seeks views on legal certainty for on-chain assets.
Prediction markets are not in that sentence. Neither are perpetual futures, which share section 4.4 with them. Both have their own numbered section in the body of the document, and neither appears in the paragraph that tells a reader what Part 4 is about.
We do not read anything sinister into this. Consultation documents get restructured late and roadmaps get left behind. But the practical effect is worth naming, because it is the difference between a firm filing and a firm not knowing it could. Anyone who triaged this consultation by reading the introduction, deciding that Part 4 was about DeFi and NFTs, and moving on, has already missed the only question the Commission has asked the industry about its own product requirements.
Three of the questions come with boxes and Question 71 does not
Section 4.4 carries five questions, numbered 69 to 73, and they are not built the same way. Question 69 asks whether prediction markets present opportunities or risks for EU consumers and investors, and offers a Yes box and a No box. Question 70 asks whether prediction markets that are DLT enabled and facilitated through smart contracts should be governed by MiFID or MiCA, and offers one box for each. Question 72 puts the classification question for perpetual futures on crypto-assets and offers three options.
Question 71 offers nothing. In full, it reads: "What substantive requirements should be considered for service providers that provide prediction market services?" There is no list to tick, no option to prefer, no draft text to react to. Question 73 does the same thing for perpetual futures.
That asymmetry is the most useful thing in the section. On classification the Commission has candidate answers and wants to know which one respondents pick. On requirements it has none, which is the ordinary meaning of a question with no options under it. There is no draft list of prediction market obligations sitting in a drawer in Brussels waiting to be tested. Whatever ends up in the report is being assembled from what arrives through this form.
The word the Commission chose for what happens on these venues
The framing sentence of section 4.4 describes prediction markets as markets "where parties take a bet on a future development in almost any area, often far removed from financial assets or services". That is the Commission's own description, in a financial services consultation, in the paragraph that sets up the questions.
It is not hostile and it is not inaccurate about a good deal of what is listed on these venues today. It is, though, gambling vocabulary, and as of 9 September 2026 it is the vocabulary sitting closest to the drafting pen. A description becomes a definition when nobody offers a better one with evidence attached. If Question 71 comes back thin from operators, that sentence is the most detailed characterisation of the category the report's drafters will have in front of them.
This is Directive 05 of our manifest in its plainest form: "Standards are set against the jurisdiction that regulates next, not only the one that has not yet." A consultation that asks the industry to name its own requirements is the cheapest version of that moment anyone in this category is going to get.
Question 70 offers a choice that the regulation treats as an order
Question 70 asks respondents to pick MiFID or MiCA. As a question about what the law should say, a binary is fair enough. As a description of the law as it stands, it is worth being careful, because today the two are not alternatives on a menu.
Article 2(4)(a) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 disapplies MiCA to crypto-assets that qualify as financial instruments. The order is therefore fixed: the MiFID II instrument test runs first, and only a negative answer releases the asset into MiCA. A firm that ticks one box and writes nothing underneath has said less than it thinks, because the same firm can hold products on either side of that test.
There is a further complication that ESMA has put on the record itself. In the final report accompanying its guidelines on the qualification of crypto-assets as financial instruments (reference ESMA75-453128700-1323), the authority notes that differences in national transposition of MiFID mean there is no uniformly applied definition of a financial instrument across the Union. The same outcome token can be an instrument in one member state and a crypto-asset in the one next door. That is the same fragmentation we described in our piece on why there is no passport for a prediction market in Europe, arriving this time through the definition rather than through licensing.
The Commission wrote down what it will treat as a useful answer
Three procedural points in the consultation document are worth more than they look, because they tell a respondent exactly how to be heard.
- The Commission states that responses "are expected to be most useful where they present a clear and detailed narrative, demonstrated by data (where possible), concrete examples, legal references and qualitative evidence", and adds that specific suggestions for solutions are welcome. That is a specification for the answer, and it favours the firm that already has a written standard over the firm drafting one in three weeks.
- Respondents are invited to reply only to the questions relevant to them. Nobody has to hold a view on stablecoin reserve requirements in order to answer questions 69 to 71.
- Only responses received through the online questionnaire are taken into account and included in the report summarising the responses. The document also gives an address for questions about the consultation itself, but that is a help desk, not a filing channel. A letter is not a submission.
One more door exists. Section 4.8 of the document ends with Question 86, a final open question inviting interested parties to raise other relevant issues not covered elsewhere. Anything that does not fit under 69 to 71 has somewhere to go.
The two dates printed in this consultation still do not match. The document itself asks for replies by 31 August 2026, while the Commission's consultation page gives 30 September 2026 at 23:59 Central European Summer Time. The page is the operative source. Anyone working from a copy of the PDF alone would conclude the window shut more than a week ago.
What an answer to Question 71 has to contain to be worth filing
The temptation is to answer a question about requirements with a paragraph about innovation. That answer has already been filed many times and it does not survive contact with a drafting team, because it gives them nothing to write. A useful answer names the obligation, names the article it should hang from, and says what a firm would have to publish or build to satisfy it. Four areas carry the weight.
Resolution and settlement. The single requirement that separates a market from a wager is that the answer is fixed before the money is. Our first directive states it as "Resolution rules are published before a market opens and are not revised while money is at risk." As a regulatory requirement that becomes concrete: the resolution source and the resolution criteria are published before the first quote, and cannot be amended while positions are open. This has no natural home in MiCA today, which is exactly why it belongs in an answer to Question 71.
Disclosure on the surface where the trade happens. Article 76 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 already requires operators of trading platforms for crypto-assets to have operating rules covering admission of assets, exclusion categories, non-discriminatory participation and settlement. The gap is not the existence of the obligation but its location. Our second directive asks for fees, spreads, settlement sources, custody arrangements and conflicts of interest stated in plain language on the surface where the trade happens, not in a policy document two clicks away. That is a content requirement layered onto an article that already exists, which is a much easier thing for a drafter to accept than a new instrument.
User protection built into the account. Deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion belong in the product, not in the discretion of a support agent. This is the requirement that the gambling sector spent two decades being forced to retrofit, and the only reason to raise it in a financial services consultation is that retrofitting it later costs more than building it now. A requirement written as a product feature is testable. A requirement written as a commitment to responsible conduct is not.
Market abuse, with the definition adjusted for what these markets trade. Articles 86 to 92 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 apply to crypto-assets admitted to trading and reach conduct off the venue as well as on it, and Article 92 requires anyone professionally arranging transactions to have systems to detect and report suspicious orders. That machinery was built around issuers and the information they hold. On a prediction market the price-moving non-public information is frequently knowledge of the underlying event itself, held by people with no relationship to any issuer or token. An answer to Question 71 that does not say this out loud leaves the most obvious integrity risk in the category described by a rulebook that was not aimed at it.
Two structural questions sit underneath all four and neither has a published answer from a national competent authority. Who is the offeror of a market that is created on request by a user rather than issued by a firm? And is each individual market a separate crypto-asset, with everything that follows from that for disclosure obligations? A respondent who raises these is not exposing a weakness. They are pointing at the part of the drafting that will otherwise be discovered by enforcement.
Writing the requirements yourself is the cheaper half of this
There is a specific reason not to wait for the report. On 17 April 2026 ESMA published a statement on the end of the MiCA transitional periods (reference ESMA75-113276571-1679) setting out that after 1 July 2026, providing crypto-asset services to clients in the EU without MiCA authorisation is a breach of Union law, and that unauthorised providers should have executed a wind-down plan by that date. The gap between "nobody has written rules for this product" and "the rules apply to you" has already closed once in this sector, and it closed faster than the firms inside it expected.
The timetable for what comes next is written into the regulation. Article 140(1) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 provides that "By 30 June 2027, having consulted EBA and ESMA, the Commission shall present a report to the European Parliament and the Council on the application of this Regulation", accompanied where appropriate by a legislative proposal. The material for that report is being gathered through this form, in September 2026.
None of the four areas above requires permission to start. A firm can publish its resolution policy, move its disclosures onto the trading surface, ship limits and self-exclusion as account settings, and write down how it monitors for event-side information, all before any regulator asks. Doing it first is worth more than doing it well later, because a firm that has already built the thing can answer Question 71 by describing what it does, with dates and evidence, which is precisely the kind of response the Commission said it wants.
A standard the industry writes for itself is not softer than one it receives. It is simply written by people who know which requirements are workable, and it arrives before the alternative does. If your firm is ready to put that in writing, our commitment page is where it starts.