Poland becomes EU's lone MiCA holdout after parliament fails to overturn veto on crypto bill

Polish lawmakers failed to overturn President Karol Nawrocki's veto on a sweeping crypto bill Friday, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Donald Tusk's efforts to bring the country into alignment with the European Union's MiCA crypto regulation. 

The vote in the Sejm, Poland's lower house, fell 18 votes short of the three-fifths majority required to override the president's decision. The outcome forces Tusk's coalition government to restart the legislative process entirely if it wants to establish a regulatory regime for digital assets.

The vote is the latest salvo in a back-and-forth battle between Nawrocki's nationalist supporters and Tusk's pro-EU coalition, Bloomberg reported. Nawrocki vetoed the crypto legislation on Monday, complaining that the legislation was complex compared to other EU countries' implementations of the MiCA framework and that the bill risks pushing domestic crypto firms abroad. Tusk attempted to rally Poland's parliament to overturn the veto on national security concerns, claiming that Russian intelligence services and organized crime groups were exploiting digital assets for covert financing. 

"To stand on this podium and say, 'Either you vote for the Russian mafia or you vote for my bill' is to give a false choice and you know it perfectly well," the chief of the president's chancellery Zbigniew Bogucki said, per Reuters. 

Industry groups were split on the legislation. While some supported the bill as a necessary step toward regulatory clarity, others warned that its requirements were overly burdensome. The CEO of Zondacrypto, one of Poland's largest exchanges, had previously described the legislation as a "step backwards" that risked criminalizing core blockchain development activity.

The regulatory standoff leaves Poland as an outlier as its EU neighbors move to implement MiCA, which came into full effect at the end of December 2024. Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, and Lithuania have already begun issuing crypto-asset service provider licenses under the new framework.

Poland's crypto market continues to expand despite the regulatory vacuum. Chainalysis ranked the country eighth in Europe for total cryptocurrency value received between July 2024 and June 2025, noting more than 50% year-over-year growth in transaction volumes. An estimated 7.9 million Poles, roughly a fifth of the population, now use cryptocurrency, according to Statista data.

Italy, meanwhile, reminded crypto firms this week to pay close attention to the Dec. 30 deadline for MiCA compliance, with its financial regulator Consob warning that registered virtual asset service providers must apply to become licensed or cease operations, The Block previously reported. 

The European Commission, for its part, is considering proposals that would centralize regulation of crypto exchanges across the bloc under a single supervisor modeled after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Such a move could eventually reduce the significance of individual member states' domestic implementations, though any such framework would take years to negotiate and implement.