Mairead McGuinness

As a senior EU official participated in drafting and negotiating the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation that defines legal status and obligations for e-money tokens. Worked on specific provisions covering issuance authorization, custody, reserve transparency and operational continuity requirements. These legislative acts created concrete compliance obligations for euro token issuers, forcing projects to obtain authorizations or to redesign custody and attestation workflows. For EURI, the new regulatory perimeter changed issuer decisions about where to domicile operations, how to structure reserve attestations and what banking relationships were required to support minting. Engaged with member states, industry stakeholders and Parliament committees to finalize legal text, producing published obligations that exchanges, custodians and institutional counterparties used when onboarding or continuing support for euro tokens. The legal clarity provided by MiCA reduced certain counterparty risks but also raised costs of compliance that directly impacted EURI’s business model and route-to-market. Official guidance and delegated acts emanating from this legislative process became operational constraints that influenced product roadmaps, AML/KYC flows and contractual terms with custodians for EURI’s issuer.