A coalition of EU-regulated tokenization firms has urged European policymakers to urgently amend the bloc’s Distributed Ledger Technology Pilot Regime (DLT PR), warning that delays will push large pools of liquidity and tokenized business to the US.
Tokenization Group Warns EU to “Fix” DLT Pilot or Risk Losing Market to US
6 February 2026 - 11:08 CET
By Sandmark staff
Securitize and seven other authorised DLT market infrastructure operators asked the European Commission and lawmakers on Feb 5 for a short, targeted solution to avoid the pilot becoming a “success trap,” or a well-designed experiment mired in legislative delay. A copy of their letter was posted on X.
Calls for wider scope, bigger volume
The firms propose a three narrow changes: expand the range of eligible financial instruments, raise the regime’s volume cap from roughly €6–9bn to about €100–150bn, and remove the pilot’s six-year licence sunset. They say this “quick fix” would preserve the EU’s competitiveness while broader changes under the Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP) work their way through lawmaking. The letter names signatories including Securitize, 21X, Seturion (Boerse Stuttgart), Prague CSD and others, and calls for the changes to be adopted rapidly as a standalone technical update.
The immediate urgency stems from recent US moves to enable large-scale tokenization. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s tokenization initiative received an SEC no-action letter in December, clearing the way for industrial-scale, T+0 settlement pilots in the US as early as 2026.
The Commission’s wider MISP, intended to integrate and modernise EU capital markets, provides the policy architecture but will not be fully effective until later in the decade, the firms warn, creating a window in which liquidity could “migrate permanently” to other jurisdictions.
Limited sandbox
The DLT Pilot Regime, in force since March 2023, was explicitly designed as a limited sandbox for trading and settlement of financial instruments on DLT.
Market proponents point to large potential upside: major consultancies estimate tokenized assets could reach the low trillions of dollars by 2030 if regulation and infrastructure grow in scale.
If Brussels opts for a slow, all-in MISP timetable rather than a small technical update now, European custody, trading and settlement activity tied to tokenized instruments could shift to US venues, altering where post-trade infrastructure, fees and innovation concentrate. The letter’s point is narrow and legally targeted; whether EU institutions will prioritise a quick regulatory tweak remains the immediate question for market participants.
