EBA Urges EU to Bring Crypto Lending Under MiCA Rules

The European Banking Authority wants Brussels to close a gap that has let crypto lending run in at least 16 EU countries without any MiCA license, disclosure rule, or leverage cap attached to it. In a submission to the European Commission published Thursday, September 24, 2026, the EU's banking watchdog asked regulators to study bringing crypto borrowing, lending, and services that connect users to DeFi protocols under the bloc's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.

What the EBA actually proposed

The recommendation came in the EBA's response to the European Commission's targeted consultation on reviewing MiCA. In a response to the European Commission's (EC) targeted consultation on MiCA, the EBA said crypto borrowing and lending should be regulated, including where crypto asset service providers facilitate access to decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocols. The regulator recommended that the EC conduct a cost-benefit analysis of legislative changes that could add intermediating crypto borrowing and lending to the list of services regulated under MiCA, potentially adding specific compliance requirements and oversight activity.

The specific tools the EBA floated are aimed at both centralized lenders and the crypto firms that route customers into DeFi. The EBA outlined potential measures including suitability tests for users, leverage limits and additional disclosure requirements. The regulator also raised the possibility of restricting access to lending involving asset-referenced or e-money tokens that require MiCA authorization and introducing a certification regime for DeFi lending protocols. The agency's rationale rests partly on scale: the EBA said crypto lending is growing across the bloc, citing previous research showing borrowing and lending activities in at least 16 EU member states. It also flagged a structural trend: easier access to DeFi through crypto firms and artificial intelligence tools is increasingly blurring the boundary between centralized and decentralized finance.

Why crypto lending sits outside MiCA today

This is not an oversight the EU stumbled into. MiCA left lending out by design: recital 94 of the regulation states that it should not address the lending and borrowing of crypto-assets, including e-money tokens, and should not affect national law on those activities. Instead, Article 142 asked the Commission to assess whether regulating crypto lending and borrowing is feasible and necessary, and the European Securities and Markets Authority restated that position on 18 June 2026 in Q&A 2883. The EBA's September 24 filing is the banking regulator's answer to that open question, not a rule change. The recommendation, published on Thursday, does not change any rule; it is formal advice to the Commission as Brussels reviews the crypto rulebook that applies to issuers from June 2024 and to most other crypto-asset rules from 30 December 2024, with the CASP transition ending on 1 July 2026.

The gap has real-world consequences for how crypto firms structure products today. Nexo said in July that custody and brokerage for customers in the European Economic Area were being provided through regulated German partners Tangany and DLT Finance, but its Earn products and crypto-backed loans were offered separately and sat outside the MiCA and MiFID authorizations held by those partners. That is the kind of arrangement the EBA's proposed certification regime for DeFi-access services would be designed to bring inside a supervised perimeter.

The figures behind the proposal

A rival regulator, a different fix: the ECB wants a wider yield ban

The EBA is not the only EU authority weighing in on crypto lending this month, and the two bodies are not proposing the same solution. Two days earlier, the European System of Central Banks — the ECB plus the EU's national central banks — filed its own response arguing for tighter, not broader, boundaries. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Union's national central banks want crypto platforms to be prevented from using lending, borrowing, staking and other products that offer indirect returns on stablecoin holdings. "Electronic money is intended to be used for making payments and not as a means of saving," the European System of Central Banks said in its response to the Commission's consultation on reviewing MiCA. In the 57-page response, the group said it "continues to support the prohibition on CASPs paying remuneration on stablecoins."

The ESCB favours widening the ban, while the EBA favours bringing lending inside MiCA so that such products have a supervisor. For a reader trying to gauge which approach might prevail, both are non-binding advice submitted to the same consultation, and the Commission has not indicated which framework it will adopt. The two filings target overlapping products — stablecoin-linked yield and crypto lending — from different starting assumptions about whether the answer is prohibition or supervision.

What this means for crypto lending customers now, and what comes next

Nothing changes for EU crypto borrowers or lenders today. The EBA's submission is one input into a review process with a defined but distant timeline. The Commission opened the consultation on 20 May 2026, and after an extension it closes on 30 September 2026. Under Article 140 of MiCA, the Commission must report on the regulation's application by 30 June 2027, and that report may be accompanied by a legislative proposal; any amendment would then require agreement from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. That sequence means any binding crypto-lending rule is realistically more than a year away, and only if the Commission decides to act on the advice and EU lawmakers agree on the text.

One limitation worth flagging for readers trying to size the market: the EBA's "16 member states" figure describes where lending activity has been identified, not the volume of loans outstanding or the number of users affected, and no dollar or euro figure for EU crypto lending was disclosed in the filing as reported. Separately, the DeFi adoption context — DeFi representing about 4% of all crypto-asset market value globally, with EU adoption above the global average but below the US and South Korea — comes from a January 2025 joint EBA-ESMA report, not from this week's filing, so it should be read as background on DeFi's overall footprint rather than a current measure of EU crypto lending specifically.