Founders

The new EU regulation MiCA almost killed our startup. We are forced to wind down our B2C business. Only B2B (as a tech provider) is still in place, but we are heavily thinking if is still worth to continue on this road...
AMA.

This is the alt account of Sister Hazel. Writings at https://powerlaw.systems.

we developed a system to help customers optimise their trading strategies thru machine learning. the issue is that if you pass orders to exchanges via API you need to comply to MiCA (as if you was a bank). also applying ML (or the AI buzzword) to crypto activity is seen as "financial advise" even if it is completely algorithmic and no human advice is involved at all...

Could you maybe explain in more detail what part of the MICA regulation you cannot comply with? Is it possible to share more about the underlying issues that your business has?

Marketing for the global leader in Web3 hiring, @plexus.

I feel frustrated. 
the regulations in EU are killing innovation. in every field. if you want to try something new in EU, you need to comply to 18263518 regulations. EU is killing itself under bureaucracy.

This sounds rubbish, but the transparency and openness is great. How are you feeling about it?

all the founders live in Italy. the company was set up in Italy.
it does not matter if we serve customers in the EU or Asia or America. we need to comply with MiCA because the company is Italian.
the only solution is to move the company to some unregulated country but then we need to move as well otherwise the Italian tax office will fine us for creating a company abroad and living in Italy.

Can you elaborate on your setup? Are you all living in the EU? Do you want to serve EU customers? How would it look like to work from the EU but to serve e.g. Asian or American customers instead? Is a shift like that possible? How do you think about that?

Crazy ideas at universalconstructor.substack.com | Co-founder, partner, investor @ node.vc

80/100K for a layer to understand deeply how the regulation apply to us and our business model, then pay 50k to obtain the license, then implement all the tech to provide extensive logging of what the customers do, send those reports continuously. implement "suspicious activity" detection. (what's suspicious in a trading strategy?). we estimated that the total recurring cost to comply is too much for us to sustain within the size of our customer base.

What would the path to compliance look like for you? In terms of money/time

Founder of Prognoze.xyz Forecasting and media.

the MiCA is EU wide... one of our competitor moved from Estonia to Virgin Islands for this reason. there are no "more lax" EU states. either you are in the EU or not.

this is so unfortunate. Could you not try to move to a more lax EU state jurisdiction where the applications of MiCA would be more lax as well? (the Baltics) Though looking over the shoulder every day is not great for sanity