Inside Information under MiCAR – What Have We Not Learned from MAR?

MiCAR, just like MAR, uses the concept of reasonable market participant as a requirement (not alone) for the emergence of inside information. Creating the concept of idealistic market participants is inadequate in both the financial instruments market and the crypto-assets market, although it is particularly unfortunate in the latter. Crypto-assets are characterized by tremendous diversity, high price volatility, the market is speculative, and the ‘investors’ in it themselves have a high tendency for risk and frequent change of assets in their portfolio. Given the above problems, instead of the current vague definition, the categories of information that are subject to disclosure could be explicitly settled, thereby eliminating excessive costs and regulatory risks for obliged entities. We should strongly consider the enactment of separate rules and ad-hoc disclosure requirements for different crypto-assets. Moreover, contrary to MAR, ad-hoc disclosure obligation in MiCAR is addressed to three categories of entities. This can result in the actualization of disclosure obligation with regard to the same inside information parallel to more than one entity. The increasing use of crypto-assets, in some cases, may also lead to the parallel applicability of MAR and MiCAR to the same issuer, which may cause huge practical problems.