France Proposes Exchange Liability for DeFi Access

France’s Treasury, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), the Banque de France and the ACPR have proposed that crypto-asset service providers vet decentralized finance protocols they connect customers to and bear liability for certain DeFi incidents, in a joint response to the European Commission’s consultation on revising MiCA published October 21.

The four institutions stated in the joint response, which they published on the AMF’s website, that “CASPs [crypto-asset service providers] should be liable for certain incidents affecting clients where they actively facilitated access.”

For exchanges and brokers, the operative standard is that phrase “actively facilitated access.” Under the proposal, a platform would owe vetting before it offers a DeFi protocol, ongoing monitoring for vulnerabilities and suspicious activity, and potentially restrictions on which protocols it may offer. The institutions also back certification of protocols and smart contracts. Liability would attach where a platform failed to vet a protocol or ignored a known security risk, not blanket across every DeFi loss.

Obligations would scale with size: the full package would apply to significant crypto-asset service providers, with lighter duties for smaller firms. A platform that wants to offer an uncertified protocol could still do so, provided it runs its own due diligence and gives customers enhanced risk disclosures. France proposed lowering MiCA’s 15-million-user threshold for identifying significant CASPs, which would pull more firms into the stricter tier.

The proposal follows groundwork the AMF and ACPR began in 2024 on smart contract certification, and it responds to gaps MiCA left open: the regulation excludes fully decentralized services without intermediaries, which is how DeFi access currently sits outside the licensing regime.

The cost picture for a licensed exchange is compliance staffing and engineering: pre-integration review of each protocol, continuous monitoring, and disclosure work for any protocol outside the certified set. No penalties, liability caps or amounts have been specified in the proposals.

France has been active on crypto rules this month: a French finance panel backed a stablecoin swap tax and a crypto exit tax in the 2027 budget, and the EBA classified Circle’s USDC as the EU’s first significant e-money token under MiCA.

The Commission is due to report to EU lawmakers by June 30, 2027 on possible MiCA amendments; only after that report would any of these measures enter legislation. French-registered firms, whose national DASP regime expired July 1, 2026 under MiCA transition rules, would be operating under whatever framework the review produces.