On 24 November 2024 the UK Financial Conduct Authority (the FCA) published a Roadmap setting out its timeline to developing a tailored regulatory regime for cryptoassets and associated activities (the Roadmap). This new regime will sit alongside the existing cryptoassets anti-money laundering and financial promotions regimes and is expected to be in place by 2026.
On 16 December 2024, the FCA published its first discussion paper on cryptoassets regulation since the publication of the Roadmap, which focuses on establishing an admissions and disclosures regime; and a cryptoassets market abuse regime (Cryptoassets DP). The FCA will publish a series of discussion papers, consultations papers, policy statements and final rules during 2025, covering such matters as trading platform rules, intermediation rules, lending rules, staking, prudential (capital and liquidity) requirements, custody, and the regulation of stablecoin activities and services
HM Treasury will introduce the legislative framework for this new cryptoasset regime, which is expected to be published during 2025.
This client briefing provides a summary of the CryptoAsset DP.
We have also prepared an EU alert which analysis the key elements of the Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 of 31 May 2023 on markets in crypto-assets (MiCA) which applied from 30 December 2024. Please see our EU alert for further details.
Cryptoassets definition
The FCA refers to the fact that in June 2023, the UK introduced a broad definition of "cryptoassets" to mean "any cryptographically secured digital representation of value or contractual rights that (a) can be transferred, stored or traded electronically; and (b) that uses technology supporting the recoding or storage of data (which may include distributed ledger technology".
and then 