Crypto Market Abuse Rules Under MiCA: Insider Dealing and Manipulation

MiCA imported a market-abuse regime

When most teams think about MiCA, they think about authorisation — getting the CASP licence, meeting the capital floor, building the governance file. Fewer realise that MiCA also imported a market-abuse regime. Title VI of the Regulation applies insider-dealing, unlawful-disclosure, and market-manipulation rules to crypto-assets, closely modelled on the EU Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) that governs traditional securities markets.

For a CASP operating a trading platform, this is not background reading. Title VI creates active obligations to prevent and detect abuse — and a supervisor reviewing the firm will expect those obligations to be operationalised, not just acknowledged in a policy.

The three prohibitions

MiCA Title VI prohibits three categories of conduct in relation to crypto-assets admitted to trading:

Conduct	MiCA article	What it covers
Insider dealing	The inside-information disclosure rule	Dealing on inside information — plus attempting, recommending, or inducing others to deal
Unlawful disclosure of inside information	The market-abuse prevention rule	Disclosing inside information outside the normal exercise of employment, profession, or duties
Market manipulation	The market-abuse reporting rule	Manipulative transactions, orders, and conduct that distort the market

Underpinning all three is the concept of inside information, defined in the unlawful-disclosure rule — broadly, precise information that is not public, relating to a crypto-asset, which if made public would likely have a significant effect on that crypto-asset’s price. The market-manipulation rule sets out how inside information must be disclosed.

How broad is the insider-dealing prohibition?

The inside-information disclosure rule is wider than “don’t trade on a tip.” It prohibits:

• Dealing on inside information
• Attempting to deal on inside information
• Recommending that another person deal on inside information
• Inducing another person to deal on inside information

It also reaches a wide set of people. The prohibition applies in particular to any person who possesses inside information as a result of their employment, profession, or duties — and, specifically, to persons with access to inside information through their role in the DLT or similar technology. That last point matters for crypto: validators, protocol developers, and others connected to the distributed ledger can hold inside information and fall within scope.

The duty CASPs cannot skip — prevention and detection

For a CASP operating a trading platform, the obligation that drives real work is The market-abuse supervision rule. It requires persons professionally arranging or executing crypto-asset transactions to maintain effective arrangements, systems, and procedures to prevent and detect market abuse.

In practice this means a CASP trading platform needs:

1. Trade surveillance — monitoring of orders and transactions for patterns indicating insider dealing or manipulation
2. Alerting and triage — a process that surfaces suspicious activity for review, with documented escalation
3. Suspicious-transaction-and-order reporting — a channel for reporting to the competent authority where the firm has reasonable grounds to suspect market abuse
4. Record-keeping — evidence of the surveillance performed and the decisions taken

A written market-abuse policy with no operational surveillance behind it does not satisfy the market-abuse supervision rule. Detection has to be a working capability.

ESMA’s supervisory guidelines

ESMA published guidelines in 2025 on supervisory practices to prevent and detect market abuse under MiCA, following its final report on the same. The guidelines aim to establish consistent, efficient supervisory practices across competent authorities for detecting insider dealing, unlawful disclosure, and market manipulation.

The practical consequence for a CASP: the surveillance model should be built with reference to those guidelines. A firm that designs its market-abuse arrangements in a vacuum risks a model the supervisor considers inadequate against the now-published expectations.

Who needs to care, and how much

The depth of market-abuse obligation scales with the firm’s activity:

• Class 3 trading-platform CASPs — full the market-abuse supervision rule obligations. Surveillance, alerting, reporting, record-keeping all need to be operational. This is core compliance, not a side workstream.
• Class 2 CASPs (custody, exchange, execution) — persons professionally executing transactions are in scope of the prevention-and-detection duty; the surveillance obligation applies to the firm’s executing activity.
• Class 1 CASPs (advice, reception/transmission) — lighter footprint, but the Title VI conduct prohibitions still apply to the firm and its people, and inside-information handling still needs a process.

The single most common gap we see in supervisory files is a Class 3 trading platform that built excellent matching technology and treated market-abuse surveillance as an afterthought. Title VI is part of the licence, not an add-on.

What a clean market-abuse file looks like

A Title VI file that holds up under supervisory review contains:

1. A market-abuse policy covering the Title VI prohibitions and the firm’s own conduct rules
2. A documented inside-information process — identification, handling, and the market-manipulation rule disclosure
3. An operational trade-surveillance capability, with the rationale for the monitoring scenarios used
4. An alerting, triage, and escalation procedure with named responsibilities
5. A suspicious-transaction-and-order reporting channel to the competent authority
6. Record-keeping evidencing surveillance performed and decisions taken
7. Design rationale referencing the ESMA supervisory guidelines

Working with counsel on a Title VI file

The diagnostic for counsel: ask whether they can describe the specific surveillance scenarios and reporting process the firm’s trading model requires under the market-abuse supervision rule — and how that maps to ESMA’s supervisory guidelines. Counsel that treats Title VI as a one-paragraph policy item has under-scoped the obligation. The firms in our index with relevant trading-platform compliance experience are listed below.