Four French financial authorities have asked the European Commission to allow stablecoin rewards under certain circumstances, putting Paris at odds with the European Central Bank and the EU's national central banks. The four submitted a joint response on how to revise MiCA, the bloc's crypto rulebook. For an industry that has spent the past two years arguing it can't compete with bank deposits, the French intervention hands it an unexpected ally.
What the French response actually asks for
The joint filing doesn't call for a free-for-all. It argues that rewards tied to stablecoin holdings should be permitted when specific conditions are met — the sort of conditional carve-out that regulators elsewhere have used to separate loyalty-style incentives from what MiCA treats as interest on e-money tokens. The four authorities put their names to the same document, which matters. In EU consultation processes, a coordinated national submission carries more weight than four separate letters saying roughly the same thing.
The timing is practical rather than symbolic. The Commission is in the middle of reviewing MiCA, and the window for national supervisors to shape the revision is open now. Once the Commission drafts its proposal, the argument moves to the European Parliament and the Council, where France's position will be one voice among many.
The ECB's side of the fight
The ECB and the EU's national central banks have taken the opposite view. Their concern is straightforward: if a stablecoin can pay something that looks like yield, it starts to resemble a deposit — and deposits are the thing banks and central banks are built to protect. That argument has been the quiet reason stablecoin rewards have been treated so cautiously under MiCA, even though the text itself is not as blunt as the industry sometimes claims.
So the split is now explicit. On one side, the ECB and national central banks. On the other, France's four financial authorities. The Commission has to write a revision that both can live with, or pick a side.
Why the industry gets a strange bedfellow
Crypto firms have spent the MiCA era complaining that the rules make euro stablecoins uncompetitive against ordinary savings products. They now have a member-state bloc making that case in regulatory language, which is more useful than another conference panel. The French response doesn't endorse crypto broadly — it's a narrow argument about rewards and conditions — but narrow arguments are what win revisions.
How the Commission handles this will be the first real test of whether MiCA's stablecoin chapter gets loosened or tightened in its first revision. The Commission has not set a date for publishing its proposal, and none of the four French authorities has indicated whether it will push the point in Council discussions if the draft goes the other way. That's the next thing to watch.
