Regulation Without Recourse: Poland’s Third Crypto-Assets Veto and the Anatomy of a Self-Inflicted Regulatory Vacuum

On June 11, 2026, the President of the Republic of Poland vetoed, for the third time, the statute designed to operationalize Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets (“MiCA”) within the Polish legal order. This Article examines a proposition that the surrounding political controversy has largely obscured: because MiCA is a directly applicable regulation rather than a directive, the veto suspends none of its substantive obligations. What the veto suspends — exclusively — is Poland’s institutional capacity to confer the authorizations the Regulation requires. The resulting condition, it is argued, approximates a lex imperfecta in reverse: Polish undertakings bear the full burden of European law while being structurally barred from its benefits. Drawing on authorization data across the EU/EEA and the licensing strategies of the twenty largest global exchanges, the Article contends that the veto, advanced in the name of protecting domestic enterprise from overregulation, operates in practice as an export subsidy to competing licensing jurisdictions — and that the July 1, 2026 expiry of MiCA’s transitional periods will not close the Polish market, but merely transfer it.

Introduction

The third veto differed from its predecessors in only one material respect: the bill returned to the President’s desk carrying a single amendment of his own Chancellery’s design, requiring the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) to publish annual reports on the functioning of the crypto-assets market. The President’s stated objections — that the statute constitutes overregulation, that its nearly one hundred pages compare unfavorably with the far slimmer enactments of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, and that its enforcement apparatus would permit the blocking of accounts for ninety-six hours and the takedown of websites “with a single click” — remained substantially unchanged across all three iterations. The Prime Minister’s response occupied one sentence on a social media platform. Between these two positions lies the question this Article addresses: what, as a matter of law rather than of politics, occurs on July 1, 2026?

The answer, it will be suggested, is considerably less ambiguous than the political contest implies, and considerably less favorable to Polish market participants than either side appears willing to concede.

The Direct Applicability Paradox

The strongest argument available to the veto’s proponents deserves to be stated at its highest: if neighboring jurisdictions have discharged their MiCA-related obligations in statutes of a dozen pages, a Polish enactment approaching one hundred pages arguably evidences precisely the regulatory exuberance that warrants presidential intervention. The argument’s force, however, is parasitic upon a premise that does not survive scrutiny — namely, that the vetoed statute is the instrument that regulates the Polish crypto-assets market.

It is not. That function is performed by Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, which, as a regulation within the meaning of Article 288 TFEU, has been directly applicable in all twenty-seven Member States since December 30, 2024, without need of transposition and without susceptibility to national veto. Its substantive architecture — capital requirements, white-paper disclosure, conduct-of-business rules, and, critically, the prohibition on providing crypto-asset services absent authorization — binds Polish undertakings today, in full, and will continue to bind them regardless of how many further iterations of the domestic statute fail of enactment.

What, then, does the vetoed statute govern? Solely the executory apparatus: the designation of a national competent authority, which Article 93 MiCA obliges every Member State to effect and to notify to ESMA and the EBA; the procedure for granting CASP authorizations; and the national regime of supervisory measures and sanctions. The third veto repealed not a single provision of MiCA. It repealed, exclusively, Poland’s capacity to administer it.

The consequence is a condition rare in European law: Polish firms bear the entirety of the Regulation’s obligations while enjoying none of its entitlements. On ESMA’s official list of competent authorities notified under MiCA, Poland appears with the annotation that its authority has not been formally designated — in the company of Romania, the sole Member State to have designated no authority whatsoever. For an undertaking with its registered office in Poland, the practical import is stark: there exists no counter at which a CASP application may be filed. Not because the applicant fails to satisfy the Regulation’s requirements, but because no procedure exists through which satisfaction could be demonstrated.

It bears noting that the European Commission polices deviation in both directions. Hungary — which erred toward excess, superimposing upon MiCA a national authorization regime backed by criminal sanction — is presently the only Member State subject to formal infringement proceedings concerning MiCA itself (INFR(2025)2174). The Commission has in parallel called upon twelve Member States, Poland among them, to complete transposition of the related DAC8 tax-transparency directive. The lesson is symmetrical: within this system, neither gold-plating nor vacuum is a costless posture. Poland, it appears, has chosen the vacuum — and one might reasonably anticipate that a failure to designate the authority required by Article 93 is no less justiciable a breach of Union law, mutatis mutandis, than the Hungarian surplus.

The Cartography of Authorization

While Warsaw litigated the statute’s shape, the remainder of the Union concluded its race for licenses. According to data aggregated from ESMA and national registers, approximately 199 CASPs had been authorized across twenty-three EU/EEA states by mid-April 2026 — individual sources report figures from 183 to 199, the variance reflecting counting methodology and the treatment of non-EU EEA states, though the order of magnitude is not in serious dispute. The geography of the authorized market is itself an argument:

Source: MiCA SCAN / ESMA registers, as of April 12, 2026

Germany — a jurisdiction not conventionally suspected of regulatory permissiveness — has issued more than a quarter of all European authorizations; the six leading jurisdictions account for roughly two thirds. Poland, the Union’s sixth-largest economy, host before MiCA to one of Europe’s most populous national VASP registers — over three thousand such registrations existed Union-wide under the pre-MiCA patchwork — stands at zero, and will stand at zero on July 1, no European supervisor being in the habit of concluding authorization proceedings in a matter of weeks.

The picture among global incumbents is, if anything, more instructive. Of the world’s twenty largest exchanges, the substantial majority have resolved their European strategy — and none has resolved it in Warsaw:

Two strategic observations follow. First, a distinct architecture of licensing hubs has crystallized — Malta, Austria, Luxembourg, Ireland — jurisdictions combining an experienced supervisor with a predictable procedure. Second, even the largest incumbents, Binance foremost among them, have ultimately yielded to the logic of the single passport: one authorization from any national supervisor opens all twenty-seven EU markets, together with Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. The passporting mechanism is, indeed, the key to the Polish predicament — for it functions flawlessly. In one direction only.

Candor requires two qualifications. Only fourteen entities have to date obtained the full authorization required to operate a trading platform, and ESMA has publicly criticized the licensing practices of Malta’s MFSA — suggesting that supervisory quality across the hubs is not homogeneous and that regulatory arbitrage within the Union remains a live phenomenon. Estimates from the spring of 2026 indicated, moreover, that roughly sixty percent of European users were still transacting on platforms lacking MiCA authorization. The regulated market, in short, is still closing. But it is closing without Poland.

The Inversion of Consumer Protection

Here one arrives at the inversion that constitutes the heart of the matter. The veto is defended as a shield for Poles — against an overzealous supervisor, against account freezes, against websites extinguished “with a single click.” Its actual operation is the following: the Polish investor will be served by undertakings licensed in Valletta, Vienna, and Luxembourg, supervised by the MFSA, the FMA, and the CSSF, and operating in Poland on a cross-border basis under the European passport — entirely lawfully, and entirely beyond the reach of Polish supervision.

The practical consequences merit plain statement. The Polish consumer will direct a complaint against an exchange to a Maltese supervisor, in English, under Maltese procedure. The KNF — the very authority upon which the vetoed statute would have conferred competence — remains a spectator: without licensing powers, without the supervisory toolkit MiCA contemplates, without a national sanctions regime (the KNF’s own position on the consequences is unequivocal). The paradox completes itself at its most painful point: the statute’s absence does not protect against dishonest actors — it strips the State of the instruments with which to confront them. The ZondaCrypto affair, in which thousands of Polish clients continue to pursue their funds, has illustrated what a supervisory vacuum costs in practice; it would be difficult to select a worse moment for that vacuum’s institutional entrenchment.

To these must be added second- and third-order effects of which the political contest takes no notice. Corporate income tax on the European operations of these undertakings will accrue to the treasuries of Malta, Austria, and Luxembourg. The compliance officers, lawyers, and AML analysts whom MiCA creates in quantity will be employed where the licenses are. And the phenomenon exhibits hysteresis: a firm that has relocated its seat, obtained authorization, and built a relationship with a foreign supervisor will not return upon the enactment of a Polish statute at the fourth attempt. The costs of changing jurisdiction are incurred once. Each successive veto does not defer the locational decisions of Polish firms — it entrenches them, merely outside Poland.

The July 1 Cliff: A Market That Changes Hands, Not One That Closes

There remains the most practical of questions. The KNF stated plainly in February 2026 that entities providing crypto-asset services may operate without authorization only until July 1, 2026 — the date on which the last of MiCA’s transitional periods expires. From that day, the provision of crypto-asset services without CASP authorization constitutes a breach of directly applicable Union law, attracting sanctions which, for breach of the authorization requirement, may under the Regulation’s framework reach 12.5% of total annual turnover. The sole lawful mode of serving the Polish market becomes cross-border activity by entities licensed in other Member States.

For Polish firms in the sector, four scenarios present themselves, none any longer costless:

1. Relocation — transferring the registered office to a Member State with a functioning procedure and filing the CASP application there, returning to the Polish market under the passport. A viable path, but authorization is measured in months: the decision can no longer be taken “before July 1”; it can only be taken “as soon after as possible.”
2. The agency model — providing services in cooperation with a licensed CASP, on that CASP’s regulatory responsibility. A faster entry, purchased at the price of structural dependence on another’s authorization and another’s risk appetite.
3. Business remodeling — confining activity to services falling outside MiCA’s catalogue, an exercise demanding surgical precision in delimiting the Regulation’s perimeter; a classification error in this domain is an error with sanction-bearing consequences.
4. Suspension — operationally the simplest exit and strategically the costliest, ceding clients to competitors waiting, passport in hand, across the border.

The epistemic assessment is clear. It is certain that MiCA binds, that the transitional periods expire on July 1, and that no licensing path exists in Poland today. It is highly probable that a fourth version of the statute — even if enacted in the autumn — will not alter the position of firms before 2027, the entry into force of provisions being no substitute for months of authorization proceedings. Uncertain is only whether the political dispute will end in legislative compromise or in Commission action — for the failure to designate the authority required by Article 93 MiCA is, one might conclude, a breach of Union law no less measurable than the Hungarian excess.

Conclusion

The third veto is presented as a defense of Polish enterprise against the regulatory embrace. It is, arguably, the most effective export subsidy the Polish political system has offered Malta and Austria in years: the Regulation binds, the obligations attach, and the only thing blocked is the capacity of Polish undertakings to compete on equal terms. Markets do not tolerate a regulatory vacuum — they fill it with other people’s licenses.

The boundary questions raised in Part V — when a decentralized exchange requires CASP authorization, and what a DAO governance-token holder actually risks — are the subject of a free webinar, “DeFi and DAO: The Limits of Regulation,” on Friday, June 19, at 2:00 p.m. CET. Registration: Microsoft Teams or LinkedIn. Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec advises crypto-asset undertakings on CASP authorization, jurisdiction selection, and cross-border restructuring.

Further reading

How Poland Became a Haven for Crypto Crime

MiCA Regulation 2023/1114 on Markets in Crypto-Assets. The End of the Wild West Era in the World of Cryptocurrencies

The Crypto-Asset Market Act: A Guide to the MiCA Regime in Poland

MiCA CASP Licence in Poland: The End of the Transitional Period

MiCA CASP Licence in Poland: The End of the Transitional Period

Robert Nogacki

Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.

There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.

One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).

Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.

He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.