Current Affairs Security

Poland's Crypto Regulation Stays Frozen as President Blocks MiCA Bill and Zondacrypto Investigation Deepens

2026-09-06

Poland's stuck. Not moving forward, not moving back—just stuck. The country's lower house fell 25 votes short on Friday when trying to override President Karol Nawrocki's third veto of legislation that would bring Poland's crypto rules into line with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The vote was 241-198 in favour, but you need 266. Close doesn't count here.

This matters because MiCA became law across the EU on December 30, 2024. Every member state was supposed to have set up a domestic competent authority to supervise crypto firms by then. Poland didn't. Won't, apparently.

Nawrocki keeps rejecting the bill because he thinks it overreaches—too much power for authorities, especially around website-blocking. That's his stated position. But the timing is terrible, because meanwhile Poland's crypto sector is imploding.

Zondacrypto, a major exchange, collapsed earlier this year. Its Estonian operator, BB Trade Estonia, was declared bankrupt in August. Prosecutors estimate losses at around 350 million Polish zlotys—roughly $95 million. Now there's a criminal investigation unraveling connections between the platform's founder and figures from Poland's previous government. Sylwester Suszek, who founded BitBay (which later became Zondacrypto), disappeared in 2022. That case is now merged with the fraud probe.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has leaned hard on the Zondacrypto scandal to push for stricter rules. Before Friday's vote, he disclosed witness testimony alleging that unnamed individuals tried to influence politicians, including a 2 million zloty payment arrangement involving a foundation tied to former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro. A witness also testified that someone had promised to secure a presidential pardon in exchange for cooperating. That's the kind of detail that makes a regulatory stalemate look worse.

The vetoed bill would have handed Poland's entire crypto market to the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF). The regulator would get real teeth: power to freeze accounts, block transactions, issue binding orders. Some industry voices say that's too aggressive—they worry it'll just push firms elsewhere instead of bringing them under formal oversight.

They might be right. Right now, roughly 2,000 Polish crypto firms are going to seek MiCA authorisation from other EU jurisdictions. Lithuania, Latvia, Germany. Anywhere but Poland. That means lost tax revenue and regulatory oversight fleeing the country.

Nawrocki's showing no signs of budging. The government won't back down either. You've got an ideological split: one side says formal supervision prevents disasters like Zondacrypto; the other says restrictive rules just kill local competition and push business abroad. Without a major shift from either camp, this deadlock could hang around indefinitely.

Poland's crypto firms are caught in the middle, unable to get domestic authorisation, unable to operate clearly under MiCA rules. It's a regulatory vacuum. And it's deepening as the investigation into what went wrong at Zondacrypto keeps pulling in more names and more uncomfortable testimony.

Source & further reading:

Sources