The Crypto-Asset Market Act: A Guide to the MiCA Regime in Poland
On 22 May 2026, the Crypto-Asset Market Act (Sejm print 2363) was transmitted to the President for signature.
For a market that had operated since December 2024 in a state of regulatory suspension — caught between a directly applicable MiCA Regulation and the absence of domestic implementing provisions — this is the moment at which theory becomes a timetable.
What follows sets out the legal position and indicates which of our texts answers which question.
Status of the legislative process
The Act completed its full passage on the third legislative attempt, following two earlier versions halted by presidential veto (December 2025 and February 2026). The chronology of the final stage was as follows:
- 6 May 2026 — the presidential bill (print 2528) reached the Sejm, considered jointly with prints 2363, 2529 and 2530.
- 12 May 2026 — first reading at the 57th sitting of the Sejm; referral to the Public Finance Committee.
- 14 May 2026 — second reading; re-referral to committee for consideration of amendments.
- 15 May 2026 — third reading and adoption of the Act (vote no. 45: 241 in favour, 200 against, 0 abstentions). The text was transmitted to the President and to the Marshal of the Senate.
- 21 May 2026 — the Senate introduced no amendments.
- 22 May 2026 — the Act was transmitted to the President for signature.
The Act now awaits the President’s signature, for which Article 122 of the Constitution allows 21 days. It enters into force 14 days after promulgation in the Journal of Laws (Article 169), subject to one exception: Article 70, concerning the obligations of telecommunications undertakings with respect to domain blocking, carries a four-month vacatio legis. Assuming prompt signature and promulgation at the turn of May and June, the Act will enter into force approximately between 8 and 20 June 2026.
One date in this sequence is immovable and independent of the fate of the domestic statute. The deadline arising under Article 143(3) of the MiCA Regulation — 1 July 2026 — marks the end of the transitional period for entities providing crypto-asset services before 30 December 2024. The ESMA statement of 17 April 2026 confirms that, after that date, the provision of services without a CASP authorisation breaches Union law irrespective of whether a Member State has implemented MiCA. The domestic legislature could shorten that period but not extend it — and in Article 162(1) of the Act it confirmed 1 July 2026 as the hard cut-off for entities entered in the register of virtual-currency activity.
What the Act regulates
The Act comprises 169 articles and amends 28 other statutes — from the Code of Civil Procedure, through the tax statutes and the Banking Law, to the Anti-Money Laundering Act. Its role is supplementary to the MiCA Regulation: where the Union act leaves a matter to the Member States, the Act resolves it. It accordingly governs the designation of the KNF (the Polish Financial Supervision Authority) as competent authority, supervisory fees and costs, professional secrecy, criminal and administrative sanctions, the register of domains used for infringements, and the transitional regime for existing market operators.
The architecture of the MiCA Regulation itself divides the market into two layers, and thereby into two categories of addressee. The first is the provision of crypto-asset services — exchanges, custody, trading platforms, the execution of orders. This is the regime governing service providers (CASPs), set out in Title V of the Regulation. The second is the public offer of crypto-assets and their admission to trading — the regime governing token issuers, set out in Titles II to IV. The distinction between these two layers is the point of departure for any sound regulatory analysis; conflating them is the source of the most common strategic errors, whether by way of superfluous applications for an authorisation an entity does not require, or by conducting an offer without the requisite documentation.
A guide to the texts
The articles below break the MiCA regime into layers corresponding to genuine decision-making situations. Each answers a distinct question.
MiCA CASP Licence in Poland: The End of the Transitional Period — the point of departure for any entity in the virtual-currency register. The text explains why the 1 July deadline is at once unextendable and — owing to the arithmetic of the KNF authorisation procedure itself — impossible for anyone in the industry to meet. It shows why filing an application extends the protective period not by a single day, and maps four strategic paths for the period after 1 July: a CASP application coupled with a parallel wind-down protocol, passporting from another EU jurisdiction, merger with an authorised entity, and a controlled cessation of activity. It is a text for a management board that must decide this week which scenario it intends to be in.
Authorisation to Conduct Crypto-Asset Business in Poland — once the decision to file a CASP application has been taken, this text describes what must in fact be prepared. It works through the entire structure of the Article 62 MiCA application: corporate documentation and the ownership structure down to the beneficial owner, the programme of operations, the three capital thresholds of Annex IV, the fit-and-proper assessment of the management board and qualifying shareholders, AML, KYC and Travel Rule documentation, the DORA framework, fees, and the catalogue of sanctions. It also flags the pitfalls that most frequently lead to requests for supplementation or to refusal — among them the concentration of the UBO, board-member and MLRO functions in a single person, which the KNF treats as disqualifying.
Public Offerings of Crypto-Assets in the EU: The MiCA Whitepaper, the KNF Notification Obligation, and Sanctions for Breach of the Disclosure Regime — for the second category of addressee: token issuers, DeFi projects, entities planning an issuance on the EU market. The text explains the tripartite classification of crypto-assets (asset-referenced tokens, e-money tokens, and other crypto-assets), the whitepaper obligation under Article 6 MiCA and the mechanism of notification rather than approval, the catalogue of exemptions under Article 4(2), the marketing rules, and the sanctions for breach of the disclosure regime. For this category the question is not “may I provide trading services,” but “may I publicly offer my token, and on what conditions.
MiCA Regulation 2023/1114 on Markets in Crypto-Assets. The End of the Wild West Era in the World of Cryptocurrencies — a text of background and context. It explains the source of the regime’s severity, reaching back to the history of spectacular collapses (OneCoin, BitConnect, Plus Token, Terra/Luna, FTX, Mt. Gox) as an illustration of the principle “same business, same risks, same rules.” It also addresses the political dispute surrounding the Act. It is reading for those who wish to understand why the regulation took the shape it did before turning to its technical consequences.
Historical context: the road through the vetoes
The third legislative attempt did not arise from nothing. Two earlier versions of the Act were halted by the President, and the dispute surrounding one of those vetoes carries significance beyond procedure, for it touches the very interest the MiCA regime is meant to protect. The text below explains that context.
How Poland Became a Haven for Crypto Crime — an analysis of the reasoning behind the veto (the domain-blocking mechanism, the charge of over-regulation, the level of supervisory fees) set against the documented case of the Huione Group, the Cambodian conglomerate sanctioned by FinCEN, whose crypto component was registered in the Polish VASP register for a stamp duty of 616 złoty. The text shows how the low barriers to entry of the former register turned a Polish “licence” into an instrument for legitimising financial crime on the scale of billions of dollars — precisely the problem that the enacted Act now closes.
It should be noted that this text relates to versions of the Act halted by veto (it was written in December 2025 and supplemented at the second veto in February 2026). Some of the parameters it cites — including the criminal classification of unauthorised activity — concern earlier drafts rather than the version ultimately adopted, in which the sanctions were tightened. The value of the text is diagnostic and historical: it explains why the third attempt had to succeed, and what state of affairs the Act, in its binding form, eliminates. The current position is described by the texts in the main section above.
Domain Blocking: The Polish Financial Supervisory Authority’s New Weapon Against Illicit Cryptocurrency Exchanges — a text devoted to one of the regime’s most contested instruments: the register of domains used for infringements (Articles 66–76 of the Act) and the cascading mechanism for removing an unlawful platform from the Polish internet, from DNS blocking, through measures against hosting, to the KNF’s assumption of the domain itself. It describes the two modes of entry (the automatic mode for unauthorised activity and the discretionary mode for other infringements), the objection procedure, and the practical and procedural weaknesses of the construction — among them blocking prior to any hearing of the affected party and the absence of any mechanism of compensation for a wrongful block. It was this mechanism that the President made the principal ground of the veto, which makes the text a natural complement to the analysis above.
The text dates from October 2025 and describes the first version of the Act — adopted on 26 September 2025 and subsequently vetoed. The architecture of domain blocking itself (Articles 66–76) survived into the binding version in substantially unchanged form, so the description of the mechanism remains current. What has been superseded are the criminal parameters it cites (among them the penalty of up to 5 years for unauthorised activity, raised in the adopted version to 8 years) and the procedural context predating the vetoes. The text should be read as an early analysis of the instrument, not as a statement of the law in force.
Where to begin
The choice of entry point depends on who the reader is in relation to the market.
An entity entered in the virtual-currency register that provides services today and does not know what will happen on 1 July should begin with the text on the end of the transitional period — for it is that text which governs the imminent decisions. An entity that has already resolved to file a CASP application will find the methodology of preparing the documentation in the text on authorisation. The founder of a project planning to issue its own token should turn to the text on the public offer. And a reader seeking the wider perspective — to the text on the MiCA Regulation itself.
They share one observation that, for the management boards of Polish VASPs, today carries operational rather than academic weight: the window for inaction closed on 22 May 2026. The remaining questions concern no longer whether to act, but how to pass through 1 July while preserving the firm and the prospect of returning to the market.
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.
