The European Commission closes its targeted consultation on the review of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation at 23:59 CEST on 30 September 2026, which is sixteen days after this article was published. Five of the 86 questions are about prediction markets, and they are narrow. They ask whether the category brings opportunities or risks, whether a DLT based venue belongs under MiFID or MiCA, and what substantive requirements should apply. We have already written about the one of them that arrives with no answer options at all. This piece is about everything that does not fit those five questions, because there is exactly one place in the document where it can go, and it has a number.
Two consultations are running and only one of them names the category
The Commission is gathering evidence for the same review through two separate exercises, and they are not interchangeable. The targeted consultation document, published by the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union on 20 May 2026, runs to 86 questions and is addressed on the consultation page to digital assets industry representatives and public authorities such as supervisors, central banks and finance ministries.
The parallel public consultation document from the same Commission department is eight questions long. It asks respondents to rate their overall knowledge of financial matters, to say which digital financial services they use, and how well they understand various types of digital asset. The words prediction and perpetual do not appear in it. On the Commission's own Have your say entry for that public consultation, the target group is recorded as EU citizens at large, the feedback period runs to 30 September 2026, and the response counter stood at 102 on 14 September 2026.
Read the two together and the position is clear. The exercise that anyone may answer does not ask about prediction markets. The exercise that does ask is the specialist one. Anyone who wants the category described in the record has to use the targeted questionnaire, and that questionnaire is a fixed list of questions written before the category was on anybody's agenda.
The open question is announced in the introduction and numbered at the end
Section 4.8 of the targeted consultation document carries the heading Final open question, and under it stands the whole of Question 86.
"Interested parties that wish to bring other relevant issues, not raised in this consultation, to the Commission's attention, should feel free to communicate them here."
The same invitation appears much earlier, on the fourth page of the document, where the Commission services write that interested parties should feel free to communicate such issues through the open question at the end of the questionnaire. That earlier passage adds a sentence that section 4.8 does not repeat: the Commission services welcome specificity and brevity in the replies. It is the only stated criterion attached to the open question anywhere in the document, and it is easy to miss, because it sits fifty pages away from the question it describes.
Question 86 should not be confused with Question 85, which sits immediately above it and asks whether there are any other issues relating to legal certainty which are not mentioned above. Question 85 is a catch-all inside one topic. Question 86 is the only question in the document with no subject matter attached to it at all.
The last EU stocktake of what sits outside MiCA did not contain this category
There is a reason the open question matters more here than it would for a mature topic. Article 142 of MiCA obliges the Commission to report on matters that are, in the words quoted in the consultation document's own footnote, not addressed in this Regulation. The institutional groundwork for that report already exists. The European Banking Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority published a joint report on recent developments in crypto-assets under Article 142 on 16 January 2025, referenced EBA/Rep/2025/01 and ESMA75-453128700-1391.
That report has two substantive chapters, one on decentralised finance and one on lending, borrowing and staking. Across roughly 40 800 words, the word prediction does not appear once. Neither does bet, wager or gambling. We counted over the full published text rather than the summary.
Section 4.4 of the 2026 consultation is therefore where this category enters the European process, not where it continues a conversation. There is no prior institutional description of prediction markets to argue with, agree with or correct. Whatever is filed between now and 30 September becomes the first material the Commission has on the subject in its own file.
Two report deadlines and a part number the document does not have
Where an answer lands depends on which mandate it feeds, and the consultation document distinguishes them in its footnotes. Article 142(1) required a report by 30 December 2024 on matters not addressed in the Regulation. Article 140(1) requires a report by 30 June 2027 on the application of the Regulation, after the Commission consults EBA and ESMA, accompanied where appropriate by a legislative proposal.
The introduction says the consultation seeks to respond to the Article 142 request and directs the reader to part 5 for it. The document's own list of parts ends at Part 4. The heading over section 4.4 reads Policy areas beyond the current scope of MiCA, and the parts list describes Part 4 as topics beyond the initial scope of MiCA, which is the Article 142 subject matter. The pointer names a part number that is not in the document, and the material it describes is in the part that is.
The practical consequence for anyone drafting is worth taking seriously. An answer about prediction markets is evidence for a stocktake of what the rulebook does not cover, not a comment on how an existing provision is working in practice. It should read as an argument about what ought to exist and why, supported by how the product actually behaves, rather than as a complaint about a rule being applied to you.
The questionnaire sits behind a login and it does not take anonymous filings
The consultation document states twice, in both the targeted and the public version, that only responses received through the online questionnaire will be taken into account and included in the report summarising the responses. The address given in the document for questions and technical problems is a mailbox at the Commission's digital finance unit. It is a helpdesk, not a filing address.
The questionnaire itself is hosted on the Commission's EUSurvey platform and opens on an access screen offering EU Login or registration. The questions cannot be read without an account, which means the document is the only way to see what will be asked before committing to answer.
The specific privacy statement for this consultation, record reference DPR-EC-01011 with DG FISMA Unit B4 as data controller, sets out what happens next. Views will in principle be published on a Europa website, and the statement lists three forms this can take: directly as received, in the form of a summary report, or included in a wider policy document. Identity is published alongside a contribution only where the respondent consents to that. And one line decides the shape of the exercise for a firm weighing whether to be visible: to avoid misuse, anonymous contributions may not be accepted. Personal data is held for up to five years after the file is closed.
So this is a signed filing that can appear in public in the form it was sent. That is an argument for writing it as a document meant to be read by a stranger, which is also the version most likely to be useful to the official reading four hundred of them.
The address given for published responses belongs to a different consultation
One detail is worth flagging for anyone who plans to check later whether their answer was published. The targeted consultation document says responses authorised for publication will be published at a web address ending in targeted-consultation-eu-venture-and-growth-capital-funds-reform. That is the Commission's consultation on EU venture and growth capital funds reform, a separate exercise that closed on 18 March 2026, two months before the MiCA consultation opened. The public MiCA document, by contrast, points to its own page. The responses to this consultation will be found on the MiCA consultation page, not at the address printed in the document.
The venture capital page is still worth opening, because it shows what publication looks like in practice. The contributions appear there as two downloads posted in April 2026, roughly five weeks after that consultation closed: one file containing the responses, and a second file of documents annexed to received contributions. Annexes are part of the published record. A position paper attached to an answer is not background reading for one official, it is a public document with the firm's name on it.
An answer to Question 86 has to carry the frame that the other questions supply
Question 71 arrives with its subject already set, so an answer can begin at the substance. Question 86 arrives with nothing, so the answer has to supply four things the numbered questions would otherwise have supplied: what the issue is, which body of law it belongs to, what the current text does and does not reach, and what specifically should change. The Commission services state elsewhere in the document that responses are most useful where they present a clear and detailed narrative with data, concrete examples, legal references and qualitative evidence, and that specific suggestions for solutions are welcome.
Four subjects fall outside questions 69 to 73 as those questions are drafted, and each of them is something an operator already has in writing somewhere.
- Venues that are not built on DLT. Question 70 asks about prediction markets where they are DLT enabled and facilitated through smart contracts. An order book with no token on it is not inside the question as written, and its European users are the same people.
- The boundary with national gambling law. A financial questionnaire has no question for it, yet it is the boundary that decides whether a venue needs a licence from a financial supervisor, a gambling regulator, or both. The four authorities looking at these contracts do not even use the same word for the product.
- The window between the end of an event and settlement. This is where user money is actually decided, and no question in the document asks how a venue closes a market, resolves a disputed outcome or handles a source of truth that changes after the fact.
- Distribution. Who brings a user to the venue, on what commercial terms, and what they are allowed to say. Nothing in section 4.4 reaches the layer between the market and the person clicking.
None of that requires a law firm to invent. A venue that has a rulebook, a settlement policy and a set of disclosures has most of the raw material already, and turning it into a filing is largely a matter of saying plainly what the product does and where the existing text stops.
Sixteen days is enough when most of the document already exists
The asymmetry here is the same one we described when the American comment record turned forty questions into two proposals. Files get written by whoever shows up, and the ones who show up with something specific end up quoted. In Brussels the file is smaller, newer and shorter-lived: there is no prior EU report describing this category, the questions that do exist were drawn narrowly, and the only route for anything else shuts on 30 September 2026 at 23:59 CEST.
Our position has not changed. We are in favour of prediction markets existing in Europe, and we think the version that survives is the one that behaved as though the rules had already arrived. A description written by the people who run these venues, filed under a name, with the awkward parts included, is worth more to this category than a well-argued objection filed after the report is drafted. The Commission has left one box open for whatever nobody thought to ask about. It costs an afternoon to use it.
If your firm is writing that description anyway, the six directives behind this initiative are a reasonable place to start, and the public commitment is where operators say out loud which floor they are working to.