The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) will direct its coordination of national crypto supervision in 2027 toward operational resilience, outsourcing and ensuring firms maintain sufficient operations inside the bloc, as implementation of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) deepens.

ESMA Chair Verena Ross said Monday that the regulator's focus under MiCA had shifted "from rulemaking towards supervision and convergence." She was speaking during a meeting of the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.

"We want innovation to flourish within a framework that provides clarity for firms, safeguards for investors and confidence in the markets," Ross said.

The priorities are set out in ESMA's 2027 work program, published Monday, which the regulator unveiled alongside a public statement. Under the plan, ESMA intends to strengthen coordination among the national authorities supervising crypto asset service providers (CASPs), with operational resilience, outsourcing risks, liquidity, reverse solicitation — the provision under which firms established outside the bloc may serve EU clients only at those clients' own exclusive initiative — and asset classification listed among its areas of focus.

The convergence emphasis matters because of MiCA's single-market design: a CASP authorized in one member state can offer its services across the entire EU, so how consistently national supervisors apply the rules shapes the operating environment for the bloc's crypto sector as a whole.

The authority also plans to harmonize CASPs' periodic reporting to national regulators and to promote common risk indicators and supervisory dashboards, giving supervisors across member states comparable data on the firms they oversee.

A central plank of the program is MIDAS, ESMA's centralized crypto-market surveillance system for monitoring potential market abuse under MiCA. The regulator expects the system's first phase to be fully operational in 2027. ESMA disclosed plans for a second phase in February, and the work program Monday said it would add analytical features and expand the types of data available, with rollout scheduled for the fourth quarter subject to board approval. Centralizing the capability at EU level marks a change from the pre-MiCA landscape, when oversight of crypto trading rested with national authorities without a shared pan-EU surveillance tool.

ESMA additionally plans to feed its supervisory experience into the European Commission's MiCA review, expected by June 2027, and to prepare for any legislative proposal that may follow. Together with the fourth-quarter MIDAS phase-two rollout, the review marks the next scheduled checkpoint for the EU's crypto framework as it moves into its supervision-led phase.

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