MiCA Conduct and Marketing Rules for CASPs: The Full Cluster

MiCA does more than licence crypto firms. It sets a conduct regime that governs how a CASP behaves toward its clients and toward the market. Marketing is the most visible piece, but it sits inside a wider cluster: conflicts of interest, order execution and routing, advice, the trading-platform rulebook, market abuse and complaints handling. They share a pattern: short article text, heavy operational expectation, and supervisors who test the working system rather than the policy on file.

This pillar maps the cluster. It opens with marketing, because that is where most teams start, then works through the conduct duties for client-facing services and trading platforms.

Whose marketing rule applies: Article 66 or Article 7

MiCA has two marketing regimes, and mixing them up is the first error in many compliance files.

A CASP’s own communications — Article 66(2). A CASP must give clients information that is fair, clear and not misleading, including in marketing communications, which must be identified as such. It must not, deliberately or negligently, mislead a client about the real or perceived advantages of any crypto-asset. Article 66(3) adds a duty to warn clients of the risks of crypto-asset transactions, and Article 66(4) requires the pricing, costs and fees policy to be published prominently on the website.

Marketing of an offer or admission to trading — Article 7 (Title II). When the communication markets an offer to the public of a crypto-asset other than an ART or EMT, or its admission to trading, Article 7(1) sets five requirements:

1. Clearly identifiable as marketing (7(1)(a)).
2. Fair, clear and not misleading (7(1)(b)).
3. Consistent with the white paper where one is required (7(1)(c)).
4. A statement that a white paper has been published, with the website address, a telephone number and an email address of the offeror, the person seeking admission or the platform operator (7(1)(d)).
5. A fixed statement, clear and prominent: “This crypto-asset marketing communication has not been reviewed or approved by any competent authority in any Member State of the European Union. The offeror of the crypto-asset is solely responsible for the content of this crypto-asset marketing communication.” Where the person seeking admission or the platform operator prepared it, that name replaces “offeror” (7(1)(e)).

No marketing may be disseminated before the white paper is published (7(2)), and the NCA of the member state where the marketing is disseminated has the power to assess it (7(3)). A CASP that operates a trading platform and seeks admission of a token is inside Article 7 as well as Article 66.

ARTs and EMTs. Marketing of ART and EMT offers follows the parallel rules in Article 29 and Article 53.

Which channels are in scope?

Every channel that carries a marketing communication is captured. The list includes, but is not limited to:

• Owned channels: website, in-app messaging, push notifications, email newsletters
• Paid digital: Google Ads, Meta Ads, programmatic display, X promoted posts, TikTok ads
• Social media organic: X, Telegram channels and groups, Discord servers, Reddit posts, Instagram, TikTok
• Influencer: paid influencer posts, ambassador relationships, community promotion incentivised by the firm
• Earned media: press releases, podcast interviews, media commentary
• Events: conference sponsorships, side events, panels organised to promote a product or token

The substance test asks whether the communication promotes the service or crypto-asset, directly or indirectly. A factual explainer of a regulatory change is not marketing. A “watch this asset” thread from the firm’s community team probably is.

Fair, clear, not misleading — the substantive test

Article 66(2) applies the standard to every CASP communication with clients and prospective clients: marketing, client agreements, risk disclosures, terms, website content and social media. Article 7(1)(b) applies the same words to Title II marketing. The phrasing is gentle; the application is not.

The three elements are separate tests, all of which must be satisfied:

• Fair means balanced presentation: benefits and risks both shown, material context included. Selectivity is not fair even if every statement is true. Cherry-picked time windows, best-of-class token selection, survivorship bias and net-of-fee-but-gross-of-tax figures all fail. The test is whether a reasonable retail client would form an accurate impression of the typical experience.
• Clear means understandable to the intended retail audience, not to a lawyer or an existing crypto user. Industry vocabulary (yield, APY, slippage, staking, liquid staking, restaking) without plain-language explanation fails for a retail audience even where it would pass for an institutional one. Yield products presented as “savings” and staking offers with an APY headline but no word on slashing, lock-up or smart-contract risk are the obvious risk areas.
• Not misleading is the strictest of the three. No false statements, and no omitted material information that would change the audience’s decision. The omission branch catches success stories without typical results, affiliate earnings without typical earnings, “risk-free trial” framing, and geographic claims (“trusted by customers in 90 countries”) that imply broader authorisation than the firm holds.

A communication can be true but cherry-picked (fails fair), or balanced but written in jargon (fails clear). The standard is not met until all three pass.

Risk-warning prominence

MiCA sets no typographic rule for risk warnings. It requires CASPs to warn clients of the risks of crypto-asset transactions (Article 66(3)) and requires the Article 7(1)(e) statement to be “clear and prominent”. A warning that the reader cannot see at a glance is hard to defend under either. A workable house standard: the warning sits on the same page or screen as the benefit claim, not behind a link to the terms; its type is readable next to the headline; it appears before substantial scrolling; and it is specific to the product, such as slashing risk for staking, liquidation risk for leveraged products and smart-contract risk for DeFi.

Performance claims

MiCA has no performance-presentation rule. The MiFID II rules for investment firms (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/565, Article 44(4)) are a sensible benchmark: past performance is not the most prominent feature, it covers complete 12-month periods over a meaningful span, the period and source are stated, and a prominent warning says past figures are not a reliable indicator of future results. A best 90-day return for a token whose 12-month return is negative fails the fair test even with a disclaimer.

What enforcement looks like

No EU body publishes a consolidated record of enforcement on marketing communications, so there is no reliable count of cases or fines to quote. What the regulation fixes is the ceiling: for a legal person, Article 111 requires member states to allow maximum fines of at least EUR 5 million or 5% of annual turnover for breaches of the CASP rules, or at least twice the profit gained or loss avoided. Decisions that national authorities publish under Article 114 are the place to look for real cases, and they are the only figures worth putting in front of a board.

Fair, clear, not misleading — worked examples

The examples below are ours. They show how the standard plays out on common copy.

Performance representation

Fails: “MiCA-licensed CASP. Bitcoin has returned 145% over the past 12 months. Start trading today.” The 145% return is the headline; the volatility and the possibility of total loss are not in the same visible content. Accuracy does not save it: the standard is about balance, not factual accuracy alone.

Passes: “MiCA-licensed CASP. Bitcoin’s 12-month price change has been +145%, and the asset has also lost 60% or more in single periods. Crypto-assets are highly volatile; you can lose all the money you put in.” The same factual claim in fair context: supportable by evidence, retail-readable, no implied prediction.

Institutional endorsement

Fails: “Trusted by major European banks and fintech institutions.” A general claim of institutional trust without evidence fails the not-misleading test.

Passes: “Clients include [Named Bank A] and [Named Fund B], named with their written consent. Case studies at [link].” Specific, named, documented.

Yield product description

Fails: “Yield-optimised exposure to algorithmic compounding strategies. Maximise your crypto-asset deployment.” Fails the clear test for retail audiences: the language hides what the product does, what risks it carries and what return profile it offers.

Passes: “A product that lends your crypto-assets to named counterparties in return for a variable rate. The rate can change at any time and may go to zero. You can lose your assets if a counterparty fails. Crypto-assets are highly volatile. Terms and risks at [link].” A retail reader can understand it without specialist knowledge.

Aged content

Fails: A blog post from January 2026 stating “the transitional period in [member state] lets existing providers keep serving clients until 30 June 2026.” Read in October 2026 the post is misleading, because the date has passed, yet it is still public. Article 66(2) applies to information a CASP keeps publishing; the obligation does not end on the day of publication.

Passes: The same post with a dated header note: “Update October 2026: the transitional period in [member state] ended on 30 June 2026.” Or the post is removed. End dates differ by member state; the MiCA tracker lists them.

Influencer and KOL marketing

Influencer and key-opinion-leader (KOL) promotion is squarely in scope. The structural point most firms miss: responsibility does not pass to the influencer. The CASP or offeror paying for the post must make sure the content is fair, clear and not misleading, and Article 7(1)(e) states in terms that the offeror is “solely responsible” for Title II marketing content. A contract that makes the influencer liable lets the firm sue the influencer; it does not shield the firm from its NCA. The influencer carries separate disclosure duties under national consumer and advertising law.

MiCA sets no per-platform format rules. A house standard that holds up:

• Short-form video: the risk warning on screen early and long enough to read, not only in the caption.
• X and similar: the warning and the paid-relationship tag in the visible part of the post, not behind “show more”.
• Stories: the warning visible for the whole display, not only on the last frame.
• Static posts: the warning in the post itself, not in a comment.
• Long-form video: the warning shown at the start and again where the product is discussed.

The paid-relationship disclosure should be unambiguous (#ad, #sponsored) rather than a tag such as #collab that a reader cannot decode.

National law sits on top. France regulates influencer promotion, including of digital assets, through its 2023 influencer law; Italy applies the Consumer Code and AGCOM’s rules for influencers; Germany applies the Unfair Competition Act (UWG). For breaches of MiCA itself, Article 111 sets the minimum maximum fines for legal persons at EUR 5 million or 5% of annual turnover. A pan-EU influencer campaign is a multi-rulebook exercise.

A marketing-compliance checklist

A defensible workflow has the compliance function approve marketing before publication, not the marketing team, the agency or the influencer, with the approval recorded by date, version and approver. Article 68(9) requires records of all services and activities for five years; keeping marketing approvals for the same period is the simple answer.

Disclosure elements to check on every piece of in-scope content: a volatility and total-loss warning visible in the content itself; for Title II marketing, the white-paper statement, contact details and the Article 7(1)(e) statement; a reference to the CASP’s authorisation; and a paid-relationship disclosure for influencer or KOL content. Campaigns extended to other member states need a review against each host state’s consumer and advertising law; the host NCA can assess the marketing disseminated in its territory (Article 7(3)). The MiCA passport extends the licence, not the marketing sign-off.

Four control gaps to design against: stale approvals (content approved, then held for an opportune moment and published after facts changed); inconsistent risk warnings (different wording across channels); approval by email thread (no version control or audit trail); and missing host-state review on campaigns extended from one market to others.

What does “consistent with the white paper” require?

Article 7(1)(c) applies to Title II marketing where a white paper is required. In practice:

Claim type	Permitted basis
Yield / return promise	Only if the white paper documents the mechanism and risk; for ARTs and EMTs, interest is prohibited outright (Articles 40 and 50)
Technical capability	Must reflect technology described in the white paper; “soon” features need a clear forward-looking caveat
Partnership / integration	Documented in the white paper or other public disclosure; cannot be implied through logos without basis
Total supply / tokenomics	Must match the white paper; a change requires a modified white paper first (Article 12)
Use case / utility	Must match the white paper’s project description; cannot be extended by marketing alone

Teams that work at launch speed sometimes treat the white paper as the legal artefact and the marketing as the commercial story. Article 7(1)(c) makes that untenable: the two must travel together.

Cited expert

We also made it clear that, despite MiCA, there will be no such thing as a safe crypto-asset.

What happens when something material changes?

For Title II crypto-assets, Article 12 applies whenever a “significant new factor, material mistake or material inaccuracy that is capable of affecting the assessment of the crypto-assets” arises, for as long as the offer runs or the token is admitted to trading:

1. The white paper must be modified, and the published marketing communications with it (12(1)).
2. The modified documents and the intended publication date are notified to the home NCA, with reasons, at least seven working days before publication (12(2)).
3. The public is told on the website, with a summary of the reasons, on the publication date (12(3)).
4. The NCA notifies the host member states and ESMA within five working days of receipt (12(5)).

The trigger is broad. A significant new factor can be operational (a major partnership ending, a custody vendor change, a smart-contract audit finding), market-related (a substantial re-pricing) or structural (a change in the issuer or its governance). Marketing teams connected to compliance catch these triggers; teams working in parallel often miss them.

How do MiCA marketing rules interact with national advertising rules?

MiCA does not displace national consumer protection. Member states keep their unfair-commercial-practices law (Directive 2005/29/EC as transposed), their general advertising law and, in some cases, specific rules on influencer promotion such as France’s 2023 law. The pattern:

• MiCA is the floor. Article 66(2), and Article 7 for Title II offers, apply everywhere in the EU.
• National rules add constraints. Some member states impose specific disclaimer wording, limits on influencer formats or restrictions on promotional incentives.
• Cross-border marketing needs a multi-state review. A campaign running in five member states has to satisfy five sets of national rules on top of MiCA.

For CASPs passporting under MiCA, the marketing-compliance workstream is heavier than for single-market firms.

Conflicts of interest — Article 72

Conflicts of interest is the section CASP applicants most often under-deliver on. Article 72 fits on a single page, but the operational expectation set by ESMA’s RTS (final report ESMA35-1872330276-1670, May 2024) is heavier than the article text suggests. The expected file looks more like a regulated investment-firm conflicts register than a tech-company governance document.

Article 72 imposes four sequential obligations: identify all reasonably foreseeable conflicts (between the CASP and clients, between clients, and between the CASP’s people and clients); prevent conflicts where feasible, through organisational structure and information barriers; manage conflicts that cannot be prevented; and disclose any residual conflict to clients, clearly and before the service is provided. Disclosure is the fallback, not the primary control.

A supervisory file is expected to work through the conflicts the firm’s own business model creates: proprietary trading against client orders and allocation of scarce tokens between proprietary and client books; custody-related conflicts (use of client assets for the firm’s funding, lending without consent); listing decisions where the platform or an affiliate holds an interest; market-making by affiliates; employee personal-account dealing; and group conflicts such as preferential promotion of an affiliate-issued stablecoin. The RTS also expects conflicts disclosures in the languages the CASP uses with clients, so a CASP serving five markets in five languages needs five versions. A static register filed at authorisation and never reviewed is a finding waiting to happen.

Routing payments and inducements — Articles 80 and 81

MiCA has no general MiFID-style inducements test. It has three specific rules, and two of them are bans.

Reception and transmission of orders — Article 80(2). A CASP receiving and transmitting client orders may not receive any remuneration, discount or non-monetary benefit for routing those orders to a particular trading platform or to another CASP. Payment for order flow is banned outright for this service; disclosure does not cure it. Article 80(3) also bars misuse of information about pending client orders.

Independent advice — Article 81(3). A CASP that tells clients its advice is independent must assess a sufficiently diverse range of crypto-assets, not limited to its own or closely linked issuers, and must not accept or retain fees, commissions or monetary or non-monetary benefits from third parties. Only minor non-monetary benefits that can enhance service quality, do not impair the duty to act in the client’s best interest and are clearly disclosed are allowed.

Portfolio management — Article 81(5). No fees, commissions or benefits from issuers, offerors, persons seeking admission or other third parties in connection with the portfolio-management service.

Outside those rules, third-party payments fall under the Article 72 conflicts framework and the Article 66(1) duty to act in the client’s best interest. Market-maker rebates, issuer listing payments, referral fees and issuer-funded research should all appear in the conflicts register with the controls that manage them.

Best execution — Article 78

A CASP executing orders on behalf of clients (a Class 1 service in Annex IV) must take all necessary steps to obtain the best possible result, weighing price, costs, speed, likelihood of execution and settlement, size, nature, the conditions of custody of the crypto-assets and any other relevant consideration (78(1)). The duty does not apply to the extent the client gives specific instructions. The most common error is treating best execution as best price: the lowest price at a venue with high settlement risk or low execution probability may not be the best result.

Article 78 then sets the machinery: an order execution policy that provides for prompt, fair and expeditious execution and prevents employee misuse of order information (78(2)); clear information to clients on that policy and their prior consent to it (78(3)); the ability to show clients and the NCA that orders were executed in line with it (78(4)); prior express consent before executing outside a trading platform (78(5)); and regular monitoring of whether the chosen venues deliver the best result, with clients told of material changes (78(6)).

Crypto best execution is harder than the MiFID equivalent. Markets fragment across many venues with uneven data quality and no consolidated tape, so the monitoring build is real: executed prices against contemporaneous venue benchmarks, slippage, and settlement quality.

Trading-platform operating rules — Article 76

Article 76 turns an exchange into a regulated venue. A CASP operating a trading platform (Class 3 in Annex IV) must lay down, maintain and implement clear and transparent operating rules (76(1)) that at least:

• set approval processes, including customer due diligence, before admitting a crypto-asset (a);
• define any excluded categories of crypto-assets (b) and the admission fees and procedures (c);
• set objective, non-discriminatory rules and proportionate criteria for participation that promote fair and open access (d);
• set non-discretionary rules for fair and orderly trading and objective criteria for efficient order execution (e);
• set conditions for continued trading, suspension and settlement (f)-(h).

The rules must bar admission of a token without a required white paper (76(1)) and of tokens with an inbuilt anonymisation function unless holders and history can be identified (76(3)). Before admission, the operator assesses the token’s suitability, including the reliability of the technology and any association with illicit activity (76(2)).

Several operating duties go beyond the rulebook. The operator may not deal on own account on the platform it operates, including when it provides exchange services (76(5)), and may use matched principal trading only with client consent (76(6)). Trading systems must be resilient, handle peak volumes, reject orders that breach price and volume thresholds or are clearly erroneous, and be able to prevent or detect market abuse (76(7)). The operator publishes bid and ask prices and depth continuously (76(9)) and trade details as close to real time as possible (76(10)), free of charge after 15 minutes (76(11)); initiates on-ledger settlement within 24 hours (76(12)); and keeps fee structures that do not encourage disorderly trading (76(13)).

Article 76 sits next to Article 67 (own funds), Article 68 (record-keeping), Article 72 (conflicts) and Title VI (market abuse). It is the largest single compliance build for a trading-platform CASP.

Market abuse — Title VI

MiCA imported a market-abuse regime. Title VI applies insider-dealing, unlawful-disclosure and market-manipulation prohibitions to crypto-assets admitted to trading or for which admission has been requested, closely modelled on the EU Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). Underpinning all three is inside information: precise, non-public information relating to a crypto-asset or its issuer that, if made public, would likely have a significant effect on prices.

The insider-dealing prohibition reaches anyone who holds inside information through their employment, profession or duties, and specifically persons with access through their role in the DLT, which can bring validators and protocol developers into scope. The duty that drives real work is Article 92: any person professionally arranging or executing transactions in crypto-assets must have effective arrangements, systems and procedures to prevent and detect market abuse, and must report reasonable suspicions about orders, transactions and aspects of the DLT, such as the consensus mechanism, to its NCA without delay. The duty attaches to the activity, not to a CASP class; a trading platform also reports identified cases under Article 76(8).

For a trading platform that means operational trade surveillance, alert triage with documented escalation, suspicious transaction and order reporting, and record-keeping. ESMA’s technical standards under Article 92(2) set the reporting detail, and its 2025 guidelines on supervisory practices tell NCAs what to look for; a surveillance model built without reference to them is hard to defend.

Complaints handling — Article 71

Complaints handling is the workstream applicants treat as a formality and supervisors treat as a test. Article 71 requires a CASP to establish and maintain effective, transparent procedures for the prompt, fair and consistent handling of client complaints, and to publish a description of them. The detail is in Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/294, the RTS ESMA developed under Article 71. A generic one-page policy does not survive a reviewer’s question.

The specifics: complaints must be free of charge, and clients told so; the CASP must provide a complaint template, not just an email address; procedures must be available, and complaints accepted, in the languages the CASP uses with clients plus the official languages of the member states concerned; records of complaints and measures taken must be kept; and the CASP must investigate and respond. The language requirement is where multi-market CASPs most often fall short: a Lithuanian CASP serving clients in Italy, Spain and Germany cannot run an English-only complaints procedure. Complaints data is also a supervisory signal, so the process should feed back into conduct, product oversight and governance.

Working with counsel on the conduct file

The conduct cluster is where generic answers surface fastest. Ask counsel how the firm’s business model maps to each obligation, not what the obligation says in the abstract:

• Marketing. Does the workflow apply Article 66(2) to every CASP communication and Article 7 to any Title II offer or admission the firm runs, and how do Article 12 triggers reach the marketing team?
• Conflicts (Art 72). Does the conflicts register map to the org chart and service mix, with named controls and a personal-trading policy, or is it a MiFID II template lifted across?
• Routing and inducements (Arts 80-81). Has the firm removed every routing payment, and can it show that independent advice and portfolio management take no third-party benefits beyond minor disclosed ones?
• Execution and the platform (Arts 76 and 78). Can counsel walk through the execution policy, the venue review and the Article 76(5) ban on own-account dealing as they apply to the firm’s trading model?
• Market abuse (Art 92) and complaints (Art 71). Is surveillance operational and aligned with ESMA’s standards and guidelines, and is the complaints procedure built against Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/294 with the right language coverage?

Counsel that gives generic answers about “MiCA compliance” has not surfaced the operational decision points. The firms in our index with documented MiCA conduct and marketing-compliance experience are listed below.