News and developments
Maltese Parliament approves updates to the VFA Act ahead of MiCA
Malta’s decision to be at the forefront of blockchain innovation and distributed ledger technology by creating a legislative framework for crypto-assets under the VFA Act in 2018, under the supervision of the Malta Financial Services Authority (“MFSA”), encouraged several crypto-asset services providers to set up in Malta. The VFA Act – in a manner similar to MiCA – draws its inspiration from the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. This means there are very few discrepancies between the VFA regime in Malta and MiCA.
The updates to the VFA Act, which were approved by the Maltese Parliament via the Virtual Financial Assets (Amendment) Act, 2024 (“VFA Amendment Act”), principally focused on the removal of the requirement to appoint a VFA agent. Effectively, in line with MiCA, this means that:
Author: Mark Caruana Scicluna, James Debono
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- any issuer who would like to register a whitepaper under Article 3 of the VFA Act; and
- any person who would like to apply for a licence to provide a VFA service per Article 14(1) of the VFA Act,
Author: Mark Caruana Scicluna, James Debono