European Ethereum Institute’s Marina Markezic on MiCA 2, DeFi, and Europe’s Crypto Future

European Ethereum Institute’s Marina Markezic on MiCA 2, DeFi, and Europe’s Crypto Future

The Hosts
Jan Philipp Fritsche — Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. Co-Founder of Bermuda. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/

Jón Egilsson — Former Chair of the Central Bank of Iceland; Co-founder of Monerium, the first company to issue fiat currency on-chain. https://www.linkedin.com/in/egilsson/

The Guest
Marina Markezic — Executive Director of the European Ethereum Institute (https://www.linkedin.com/company/european-ethereum-institute/), a Brussels-based nonprofit working on Ethereum policy, public blockchain advocacy, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem. The Institute builds on the work of the European Crypto Initiative and focuses on making sure European policymakers understand the realities of permissionless infrastructure, DeFi, tokenization, and on-chain finance.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamarkezic/

MiCA is back on the agenda. The question is whether Europe will use the review process to make crypto regulation more competitive, or whether it will double down on a framework that favors incumbents.

In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jón and Jan are joined by Marina Markezic from the European Ethereum Institute to unpack the European Commission’s consultation on what the industry has started calling “MiCA 2.” Marina explains that MiCA 2 is not yet an official legislative proposal, but rather a review process triggered by revision clauses in the original regulation. The Commission is gathering input on what has changed since MiCA was finalized, including DeFi, staking, perpetuals, tokenization, and the treatment of assets that may not fit neatly into today’s categories.

The conversation begins with stablecoins, where Jón argues that Europe’s current framework structurally favors banks over non-bank issuers. Under MiCA, non-bank issuers must rely on banks as intermediaries and safeguard a significant share of reserves within the banking system. For Jón, this is not just a technical design flaw but a political choice: Europe must decide whether it wants a competitive market economy for stablecoins or a bank-led system protected by regulation.

Marina pushes back on the idea that consultation processes are meaningless. She argues that industry participation still matters, especially because regulators count the number of responses and because many questions can be answered without extensive legal or policy teams. But she also acknowledges that different parts of the consultation carry different political weight. Stablecoins are highly charged because of the European Central Bank’s role and concerns around monetary sovereignty, while areas like DeFi and tokenization may still be more open to technical input.

From there, the discussion turns to DeFi. Marina explains why MiCA originally avoided regulating DeFi in detail: the market was still developing, definitions were unclear, and legislators focused instead on centralized crypto asset service providers and stablecoins. The current consultation reopens the question of whether DeFi should be brought into MiCA, left largely outside it, or addressed through lighter-touch measures such as disclosures, self-regulation, or technical standards.

Jan argues that “DeFi” may be the wrong framing altogether. The core innovation is not that every application is decentralized from day one, but that finance can be deployed on decentralized infrastructure in a way that is non-custodial, permissionless, and programmatic. He suggests regulators should focus less on decentralization as a binary label and more on three dimensions: decentralization, permissionlessness or non-custodial control, and mutability versus immutability.

This leads to one of the episode’s central ideas: perhaps the better term is not DeFi, but “permissionless finance.” Decentralization matters most at the infrastructure layer, while application-level regulation should ask whether users’ funds can be taken, censored, frozen, or redirected by an operator. That distinction is crucial for founders, because every new protocol starts with some degree of centralization. If regulation requires full decentralization from the start, Europe risks making new on-chain applications impossible to launch.

The episode also explores tokenization. Marina explains that the legal challenge is not simply putting assets on-chain, but determining whether tokenization changes the legal nature of an asset. A tokenized financial instrument may fall under existing securities law, MiFID, the DLT Pilot Regime, or potentially MiCA, depending on how it is structured and where it is issued. For Europe, this matters because securities law remains fragmented across member states, while blockchain infrastructure could theoretically support a more unified capital market.

The final section broadens the regulatory map beyond MiCA. Marina highlights GDPR, where public blockchains raise hard questions about personal data, wallet addresses, pseudonymization, and the right to erasure. If a wallet address can be linked to other private data, it may be treated as personal data — creating a direct tension with immutable public ledgers.

The conversation closes with cyber resilience, open source software, and the need for policymakers to understand the technical stack they are regulating. Marina argues that public blockchains, smart contracts, interoperability, finality, privacy, and governance are no longer niche technical questions. They are becoming core policy questions for Europe’s financial and digital future.

MiCA 2 may never arrive as a single law. But the review process will shape how Europe thinks about stablecoins, DeFi, tokenization, and permissionless infrastructure for years to come. The stakes are not just compliance. They are whether Europe builds a regulatory environment where Ethereum-based innovation can compete globally — or whether the future of on-chain finance is decided elsewhere.