Spain’s top securities regulator is calling for changes to the European Union’s framework for blockchain-based market infrastructure, arguing that the current rules are too narrow to support meaningful growth in tokenized securities.

Carlos San Basilio, president of Spain’s National Securities Market Commission, said the EU’s distributed ledger technology regime has been designed more as a test environment than as a pathway to scale. Speaking at the ninth Digital Assets Forum organized by El Confidencial, he pointed to limited industry uptake and a strict market-value ceiling as key signs that the model is holding the sector back.

A cap San Basilio says is too low

At the center of the debate is the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime, which limits the total market value of tokenized instruments that can be admitted on a DLT platform to €6 billion. San Basilio said that ceiling is the main obstacle to unlocking investment in tokenized securities.

He contrasted that threshold with the much larger size of traditional markets, noting that the market capitalization of the Spanish stock exchange is about €1.7 trillion. In that comparison, the current limit appears small relative to the scale of existing capital markets the industry may eventually want to replicate or connect with through tokenization.

Limited participation under the current framework

San Basilio said only five firms are registered under the present system, including one from Spain. He presented that figure as evidence that the regime, in its current form, is not attracting broad participation.

His criticism is not that the framework exists, but that it remains too constrained. In his view, the structure favors experimentation while offering too little room for firms to build businesses around tokenized issuance and trading at a meaningful size.

Why raising or removing the ceiling matters

According to the case outlined at the forum, lifting or eliminating the cap would make it possible for large financial institutions to issue or trade more liquid large-cap shares or benchmark bonds that are currently out of reach under the pilot’s limits.

A higher threshold could also help firms justify the cost of integrating blockchain-based infrastructure. One concern raised is that a platform could become unusable simply because the value of its listed assets rises, since the restriction is tied to market value rather than trading volume. That design, supporters say, reduces operational flexibility for institutional portfolios.

Brussels has proposed changes, but pressure continues

The European Commission has already proposed increasing the ceiling from €6 billion to €100 billion as part of the Market Integration and Supervision Package, or MISP. That would represent a substantial shift from the current limit.

Even so, some market participants want the EU to go further. A group of 27 financial firms, including Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart Group, and Securitize, is pressing for a higher threshold, arguing that even €100 billion would still be restrictive when measured against the trillions of euros represented by global capital markets.

What comes next

For now, the confirmed next step is the Commission’s proposal to revise the cap through MISP, while regulators and market participants continue to debate how permissive the DLT framework should be.

San Basilio’s intervention adds support from a national regulator to broader industry calls for change. The central policy question remains whether the EU wants the DLT regime to remain primarily a controlled pilot or evolve into a structure capable of supporting larger tokenized securities markets.

Source: Coin Edition