ESMA

ESMA publishes registers built from data that national authorities report, from authorized fund managers and money market funds to credit rating agencies and crowdfunding service providers. A registers portal offers search tools and machine-to-machine access for larger organizations, and a code repository helps users download data from some of the registers.

Under Articles 109 and 110 of MiCA, ESMA also keeps the central register of crypto-asset white papers, authorized crypto-asset service providers and non-compliant entities. It published this interim MiCA register as five CSV files with weekly updates and planned to move it into its own IT systems in mid-2026. A record stays in the register after an authorization is withdrawn, with the date of the withdrawal.

The crypto regulation MiCA entered into force in June 2023 and has applied to crypto-asset service providers since 30 December 2024. ESMA drafted its technical standards and guidelines together with EBA, EIOPA and the ECB and works with the national authorities on a common approach to the authorization of providers. Firms that served clients under national law could continue during a transitional period that ended on 1 July 2026 at the latest.

Since 23 December 2025, crypto-asset white papers have to be filed in the machine-readable iXBRL format. For trading platforms ESMA published a JSON schema for order book records, so that supervisors receive orders and trades in the same structure from every provider.

Guidelines of ESMA tell national supervisors and firms how to apply EU law in practice, while technical standards become binding law once the European Commission adopts them. Under MiCA, the ESMA guidelines on knowledge and competence require staff who inform or advise clients about crypto-assets to prove their skills, and The Big Whale built its MiCA certification on them.

For DORA, which has applied since 17 January 2025, ESMA writes the technical standards together with the two other European supervisory authorities. The regulation covers more than 20 types of financial entities, and 12 of them fall within the remit of ESMA.

Verena Ross, a German national who was the first executive director of ESMA from 2011 to 2021, became chair of the authority on 1 November 2021. In October 2026 the Council of the EU confirmed Carlo Comporti as her successor, a commissioner of the Italian regulator CONSOB who had been secretary general of the Committee of European Securities Regulators. Natasha Cazenave has been executive director since 1 June 2021 and worked for more than ten years at the French AMF before.

The board of supervisors takes the policy decisions of ESMA and adopts its technical standards, opinions and guidelines. Besides the chair it includes the heads of the national authorities, such as BaFin for Germany, with non-voting members from the European Commission, the ESRB, EBA, EIOPA and the EFTA Surveillance Authority.

ESMA runs a supervisory program on digital innovation that looks first at how supervised firms use artificial intelligence and tokenization. It has asked market participants for evidence on the use of tokenized collateral in central clearing, and it calls the rules for the move of EU securities settlement to T+1 in October 2027 complete.

ESMA has its offices at 201-203 rue de Bercy in 75012 Paris, close to the stations Gare de Lyon and Gare d'Austerlitz. Letters go to the postal address CS 80910, 75589 Paris Cedex 12, at the same street address on rue de Bercy.