France’s four financial authorities published a joint response to the European Commission’s MiCA review on October 20, asking Brussels to regulate MiCA stablecoin rewards paid by platforms and other third parties instead of banning them. The Treasury, the AMF, the Banque de France and the ACPR signed it. A month earlier the European System of Central Banks, of which the Banque de France is a member, asked for the opposite.
MiCA stablecoin rewards already count as interest
France keeps one line intact. Issuers of e-money tokens should still be barred from paying interest, the response says, because remunerated tokens could drain bank deposits and turn a settlement asset into an investment product. The change is for what it calls indirect remuneration: rewards from crypto-asset service providers or platforms for holding or using a token, returns earned by funds that hold e-money tokens, and returns linked to using them for settlement.
The current text already covers most of that. Article 50 of MiCA bars issuers and crypto-asset service providers from granting interest, and it treats any benefit tied to how long someone holds a token as interest, including payments “directly from the issuer or from third parties”. A platform paying a yield on a customer’s euro token balance falls inside that definition today. The French proposal would move it outside, subject to four conditions set in the regulation itself and detailed by the European Banking Authority: transparency to holders, no promise of a guaranteed return, no marketing as a savings product, and monitoring of the effect on bank deposits.
France points to Washington, the ECB points to savings
The French case rests on competition. Indirect rewards “tend to develop in any event”, the response says, and the US GENIUS Act bans issuer interest but leaves third-party rewards alone. Such rewards lower the cost of holding a token and can support financial services that run around the clock, the authorities add. An EU regime stricter than its main competitors “could weaken the position of euro-denominated EMTs”, in the French reading. GL Insight has tracked how US issuers built products around that split, from Circle’s USYC fund to OUSD’s reserve income split.
The ESCB response, published in September, keeps the issuer ban and widens it. It wants the prohibition to reach indirect rewards such as loyalty benefits and liquidity mining, and to cover unregulated crypto lending and staking. Its reasoning is that e-money “is intended to be used for making payments and not as a means of saving”. The central bank that signed the French text is part of the system that wrote this one, and the French Treasury notice presents the document as a joint national position. Bitcoin.com reported the split on October 26.
The reserve rules show the same divide on bank deposits
France goes further on reserves. It rated the rule that e-money institutions hold 30% to 60% of reserves in bank deposits as “not at all appropriate” and proposes daily and weekly liquidity ratios, maturity limits and counterparty diversification, in line with the GENIUS Act. The ESCB also backs replacing the deposit floor with liquidity buckets, so on reserves the two positions are close, and the gap between them is about rewards.
France also wants to limit MiCA to euro tokens offered or traded in the EU, which would let issuers abroad issue in euros without full EU authorisation. It argues the current rule deters issuance in euros. That fits a wider pattern of regulators deciding which foreign tokens count, and Canada’s new stablecoin rules take their own line on redemption.
Supervision is moving at the same time. The EBA named USDC the first significant e-money token in the EU on October 14, out of 45 notified, and takes over oversight of Circle’s French entity’s own funds, reserves and liquidity from the ACPR on November 12, its release says.
Bottom line
France wants the euro token market to compete with dollar tokens on the terms the GENIUS Act set, and the ESCB wants e-money kept away from savings. Article 140 gives the Commission until June 30, 2027 to report on MiCA, so the rewards question will be settled in a legislative proposal, with Paris and Frankfurt on opposite sides. More stablecoin coverage sits on the GL Insight hub.
Watch for:
- The Commission’s Article 140 report and any draft amendment to Article 50
- Whether other member state governments back the French conditions
- How the EBA supervises USDC rewards offered by EU platforms after November 12