Digitalisation of the capital market
Rüdiger Litten · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024
Digitalisation affects both the way in which capital market services are provided to clients and the way in which trading is executed. In 2023, the EU enacted MiCAR, which is a basic law for the digital capital market. MiCAR, like MiFID, regulates the solvency and organisation of capital market actors and the conduct of business vis-à-vis their clients. The difference from MiFID is that MiCAR only applies to crypto-assets, i.e., digital representations of a value/right that can be transferred and stored electronically using DLT. MiCAR has a broader scope than MiFID. For example, it covers prospectus (whitepaper) requirements for crypto-assets. But MiCAR is not exhaustive either. Other aspects of the capital market are either regulated by other laws (e.g., in the revised AMLD) or are not (yet) specifically addressed by lawmakers (e.g., robo-advice). There can be little doubt that digitalisation is changing the capital market and its laws fundamentally.