Twenty-four European trade associations and tokenization firms, including Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart Group, Securitize and the European Ethereum Institute, sent a joint letter dated September 7 to the European Council and the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, asking lawmakers to remove or sharply raise the proposed cap on tokenized financial instruments under the revised DLT Pilot Regime.
The European Commission had proposed raising the current 6 billion euro cap to 100 billion euros as part of its Market Integration and Supervision Package. The coalition calls that increase “an important step forward” but says it is already insufficient: the letter states that some existing European tokenization projects have already reached 350 billion euros in volume and are still growing. Its preferred outcome is no cap at all; its fallback is a threshold of 1,500 billion euros, a figure it justifies by pointing to a U.S. settlement platform it says can already tokenize equities and other assets with no volume cap at all, at a scale it puts at roughly 150 trillion euros.
The signatories also object to a separate provision that would set a more generous cap, 500 billion euros rising to 1 trillion, for central securities depositories than for DLT market infrastructure operators, arguing that identical business activity should face identical thresholds regardless of which regulatory category a firm falls under.
The original insight for fintech operators building on either side of the Atlantic: the letter’s own comparison, a U.S. platform operating with no volume cap set against a European proposal still debating whether 100 billion or 1,500 billion euros is the right ceiling, is itself the argument European tokenization infrastructure has been making since the tokenization race split unevenly among banks. A hard cap of any size keeps the EU a step behind on the same technology where the stablecoin market has already split into two competing regulatory camps, and whatever number Brussels lands on will function as a soft ceiling on how large a European tokenization platform is allowed to become before it has to look for scale elsewhere.
Source: ADAN (joint industry letter)
