Earlier today, members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in the European Parliament voted against a version of the Markets in Crypto Assets, or MiCA, bill that could have effectively banned the proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies within the EU. This comes as a huge relief for the crypto industry, whose representatives had previously warned about the threat of a hardline regulatory scenario.

MiCA is a regulatory framework that contains 126 articles, as well as a detailed plan of their implementation by the EU’s and member states’ institutions. The draft was introduced by the European Commission back in 2020 as a part of its Digital Finance strategy.

MiCA covers a wide range of crypto-related subjects, such as the status of all major currencies and stablecoins, mining and exchange platforms’ operations, with some notable exclusions such as digital currencies issued by central banks, or CBDCs, security tokens, nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, and decentralized finance, or DeFi.

The main intrigue of today’s parliamentary session lay in the significant differences between two versions of the draft that were up for a vote. One of them contained language that could outlaw any operations with the cryptocurrencies that rely on the Proof of Work, or PoW, protocol. The problematic line would require currency providers to submit a detailed plan of their compliance with environmental sustainability standards.

In the case of Bitcoin (BTC) and some other decentralized systems such details couldn’t be provided in principle, as there’s no existing central operator or an individual or collective decision maker.

That is why this version of the draft was previously corrected to remove such a regulatory