The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has asked for evidence on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and their usage.
Its eager for stakeholders to share the use of DLT for trading and settlement, and on the need for amending regulatory technical standards (RTS) on regulatory reporting and transparency requirements.
ESMA needs to assess whether the RTS developed under MiFIR relative to certain pre-and post-trade transparency and data reporting requirements need to be amended to be effectively applied to securities issued, traded and recorded on DLT.
It covers equity transparency, non-equity transparency, double volume cap and provision of data, transaction monitoring, reference data, ongoing record keeping and clock synchronisation.
In addition, in relation to the transaction reporting exemption, the call for evidence seeks stakeholders’ views on possible effective ways to allow regulators’ access to information on transactions, financial instruments’ reference data and transparency data.
It hopes to build a more efficient, secure and cost-effective management of the data stored on DLTs, while preserving its quality, usability and comparability.
As for the next steps, stakeholders can provide comments by 4 March 2022. Based on feedback, ESMA will then make necessary amendments.
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