Overview
- The Malta Financial Services Authority published a discussion paper that opened a public consultation on June 12 and is accepting responses until July 10.
- The paper says many projects labelled decentralised still have central controls such as administrator keys, concentrated governance, protocol upgrade rights and control of user interfaces.
- The MFSA asks whether decentralisation should be assessed as a spectrum and proposes a new legal category called “software-based organisations” to treat DAOs as organisations separate from the protocol code.
- The consultation seeks feedback on mandatory measures for regulated firms, including smart-contract audits, governance reviews, risk assessments and the use of automated ‘guardian agents’ to monitor and constrain autonomous systems.
- The initiative is timed ahead of the EU’s MiCA enforcement deadline and could shape whether firms must obtain authorisation or adopt wind-down plans if they integrate DeFi services that regulators judge not fully decentralised.