Financial and cryptocurrency sector coalitions in Europe pressed regulators to eliminate the planned 100 billion-euro limit on tokenized assets or elevate the threshold to a minimum of 1.5 trillion euros ($1.74 trillion), contending that the suggested ceiling would restrict expansion.
This appeal arrived via a letter directed at the European Parliament and the European Council, featuring endorsements from bodies such as the French digital asset organization Adan, the Crypto Council for Innovation, and the European Ethereum Institute, alongside corporate entities like Nasdaq and Boerse Stuttgart.
The distributed ledger technology pilot framework established by the European Union permits participants to experiment with the trading and clearing of tokenized equities, debt instruments, and mutual funds while receiving waivers from specific legacy financial mandates. Following observations of what it termed “modest” participation, the European Commission suggested broadening the scope of the pilot framework after seeing what it called “modest” participation.
Tokenization involves depicting financial products on a distributed ledger network as digital tokens.
The commission put forward a plan to elevate the existing 6 billion-euro limit up to 100 billion euros. Adan said the increase remains insufficient considering international market progress. The preferred scenario for the organization is to abolish the restriction completely, or alternatively, establish it at 1.5 trillion euros, representing 15 times the suggested maximum.
Certain current European initiatives have already hit 350 billion euros and anticipate additional expansion, according to the document’s authors. They refrained from naming these specific initiatives or detailing the methodology behind this valuation.
The document emphasizes that these limits apply to the market capitalization of accepted financial instruments instead of the daily trading turnover. Consequently, the operational capacity of a platform is dictated by the worth of the assets it accommodates, irrespective of active trading frequency.
The associations additionally objected to unequal restrictions that could grant central securities depositories—which track asset ownership and manage clearing processes—significantly higher capacity allowances compared to alternative distributed ledger market facilitators. They asserted this would place emerging service providers at a competitive disadvantage.
The alliance juxtaposed the proposed European limitations against an unnamed dominant American clearing infrastructure that operates without volume restrictions for tokenizing equities and other financial products.
Should regulators decide to keep a ceiling in place, the collective requests that the commission retain the authority to adjust it upward in tandem with market expansion, avoiding any fixed maximum that might limit future scalability.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/10/nasdaq-boerse-stuttgart-others-ask-eu-to-remove-or-increase-cap-in-tokenization-trial.
