Poland’s crypto sector in limbo as leader vetoes MiCA bill anew

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Poland’s president has vetoed a second attempt at legislation to align the country’s digital asset rules with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, leaving domestic cryptoasset companies in limbo as MiCA’s final transitional deadline of July 1, 2026, draws ever closer.

• Second veto stalls MiCA alignment
• Tusk frames MiCA as shield against crypto crime
• Time running out for Poland

On February 12, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed Bill 2064, proposed legislation to align the country’s digital asset rules with the EU’s MiCA framework, including mandating a National Competent Authority (NCA) in the form of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF).

The veto followed a February 10 announcement by the KNF warning that Poland has not designated a competent authority to supervise the digital asset market, highlighting the impending MiCA deadline this summer.

This is the second time Nawrocki, who is aligned with the right-wing populist opposition party, has vetoed a bill aimed at bringing the country in line with MiCA. On December 1, he vetoed the previous iteration of the legislation, named Bill 1424, on the basis that it posed “a real threat to the freedoms of Poles and the stability of the state.”

Part of the president’s reasoning for this second veto is that Bill 2064 is “practically identical” to the original.

“I once again vetoed the cryptocurrency market bill. For the second time, I received a bill practically identical to the one I had previously vetoed. One detail was changed, and fundamental errors were not addressed,” said Nawrocki “I will not sign a bad law just because it was passed again by a parliamentary majority—a bad law, even if passed a hundred times, is still a bad law.”

Critics of both versions of the legislation have argued that they impose too stringent licensing rules, high compliance costs, and criminal-liability provisions for service-provider executives, as well as posing the risk of stifling innovation and creating an “uncompetitive business environment.”

When announcing his veto of the updated bill, Nawrocki argued that “if the government truly wanted the President’s signature, the previously raised objections should have been taken into account. This was not the case.”

He added that: “Poland should attract innovation, not push it away. Therefore, I invite the government to collaborate substantively on the drafting of a new law that will ensure secure trading, tax clarity, and conditions for the development of modern technologies… We could begin work on the law tomorrow and quickly complete it.”

In the meantime, without the passage of a MiCA-compliant law, foreign entities that obtain a MiCA license in their home countries will still be able to provide services in Poland, but Polish companies will have no formal route to a MiCA-recognized license domestically. This, in turn, means that Polish cryptoasset service providers (CASPs) will not be able to take advantage of the EU’s passporting rule that allows a company regulated in one EU nation to operate freely across the entire 27-nation bloc.

The bill’s failure also means that Poland is now the only holdout among the 27-nation EU bloc that has not passed MiCA-compliant legislation, leaving domestic digital asset companies in limbo, at a competitive disadvantage, and potentially considering relocation.

Tug of war

“There’s no doubt that this market is highly susceptible to exploitation by foreign services, intelligence agencies, and mafias,” Tusk told parliament. “The challenge is for the state to provide the tools to ensure it’s not helpless.”

He added that the bill would give Polish authorities “tools to control a new market, which is not regulated, where the Russian services, Russian mafia and money laundering are present.”

However, President Nawrocki, who favors a more lenient approach to cryptoasset regulation, vetoed the bill on December 1, on the basis that it poses “a real threat to the freedoms of Poles and the stability of the state.”

A week later, an attempt was made in parliament to overturn Nawrocki’s veto, but it also failed, falling 18 votes short of the three-fifths majority required to override the president’s decision.

Back to the top ↑

With the MiCA compliance clock ticking, Polska2050, the center-right party that is a party of the ruling coalition with Tusk’s Civic Coalition party, attempted to reintroduce a similar bill on December 8, this time known as Bill 2050.

Bill 2050 was described by Polska2050 member Adam Gomoła as an “improved” successor to the vetoed digital asset bill. However, government spokesman Adam Szłapka reportedly said that “not even a comma” had been changed from the previous version, while Polish politician Tomasz Mentzen — who had previously criticized Bill 1424 as “118 pages of overregulation” — wrote on X that, with Bill 2050, “the government has once again adopted exactly the same bill on cryptoassets.”

In this regard, at least, it is true that Bill 2050, like Bill 1424, intended to align Poland with MiCA by designating the KNF as the primary domestic digital asset market regulator.

The Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, did not complete a full parliamentary passage of Bill 2050 before it was effectively overtaken by procedural steps toward a further revised bill, which later became Bill 2064.

With Bill 2064 now effectively dead in the water as well, it is unclear how the impasse and regulatory tug-of-war between the president and parliament can be resolved, with both sides seemingly determined to get their way. In the meantime, time is running out on the EU’s July deadline.

Back to the top ↑

Watch: What’s ahead for crypto regulation? Highlights from Blockchain Futurist Conference 2025