European market infrastructure players including Nasdaq and Börse Stuttgart Group are calling on EU lawmakers to rethink proposed limits on the scale of distributed ledger technology markets.
A coalition of 39 organisations has urged the European Parliament and Council to go further than the European Commission’s proposed €100 billion cap under the DLT Pilot Regime, arguing that the limit could constrain the development of institutional-scale tokenised markets.
The Commission’s Market Integration and Supervision Package proposes raising the existing €6 billion aggregate cap to €100 billion, alongside expanding the regime to cover all MiFID II financial instruments and making the framework permanent.
However, industry participants argue that €100 billion could quickly become restrictive as tokenised markets grow. The coalition is calling for the cap to be removed entirely or significantly increased, alongside greater flexibility for the Commission to raise it as the market develops.
The group also wants remaining asset-class restrictions removed and the existing six-year licence sunset eliminated, allowing market infrastructure firms to make longer-term investments in DLT-based platforms.
Marius Jurgilas, CEO of Axiology, said Europe had spent years developing a regulated framework for tokenised capital markets but now needed to ensure those markets could scale.
“A €100 billion ceiling may look generous on paper, but for market infrastructure it could quickly become a brake on investment and scale,” he said.
The coalition is also calling for the DLT amendments to be separated from the wider legislative package and treated as a standalone “quick fix”.
It argues that waiting for the broader market-integration measures could delay implementation until 2030 or later, potentially allowing liquidity and activity to move to jurisdictions developing tokenised markets more rapidly.
The push comes as US market infrastructure firms accelerate their own plans for tokenised securities and around-the-clock trading. European operators warn that without sufficient capacity, issuers and investors could increasingly look outside the region.
