MiCA Market Abuse Rules

MiCA Title VI takes the insider-dealing, unlawful-disclosure, and market-manipulation prohibitions familiar from securities law and applies them to crypto-assets admitted to trading — and then, in Article 92, turns them into a build obligation: any firm professionally arranging or executing crypto transactions must run systems to detect, prevent, and report abuse. For a CASP operating a venue or executing orders, that is engineering, not a principle. This spoke covers Articles 86-92 and what they require operationally; for where Title VI sits among MiCA's other titles, see the MiCA timeline.

The market-abuse regime in brief

• MiCA Title VI (Articles 86-92) is the crypto market-abuse regime.
• Prohibited: insider dealing, unlawful disclosure of inside information, market manipulation.
• Article 92: persons professionally arranging or executing crypto transactions must have systems to prevent and detect abuse and report suspicious orders/transactions.
• ESMA guidelines (under Article 92) align supervisory practices for prevention and detection.
• Mirrors securities MAR conceptually; the detection engineering differs (24/7, multi-venue, on-chain).
• Applies where there is a professional intermediary / CASP venue; the DeFi "fully decentralised" boundary is contested.

The three prohibitions

Title VI rests on the same three pillars as the EU's securities market-abuse framework, applied to crypto-assets admitted to trading:

"Inside information" is non-public, precise information that, if public, would likely have a significant effect on the crypto-asset's price. Recommending or inducing another person to deal on inside information is also caught.

The Article 92 detection obligation

The pillar that turns prohibition into an operational programme is Article 92: persons professionally arranging or executing transactions in crypto-assets must have effective arrangements, systems, and procedures to prevent and detect market abuse, and to report suspicious orders and transactions.

This is the crypto analogue of the securities-market obligation to maintain surveillance and file suspicious transaction and order reports. ESMA has issued guidelines under Article 92 to align competent authorities' supervisory practices for the prevention and detection of insider dealing, unlawful disclosure, and manipulation, and to ensure uniform application of Title VI.

Who this binds, in practice:

• CASPs operating trading venues
• Brokers and execution intermediaries
• Other persons professionally arranging or executing crypto transactions

It does not turn an ordinary individual holder into a surveillance entity. The obligation is on the professional layer.

Why the detection engineering is different

The principles are familiar from securities markets. The implementation is not, because crypto market structure differs:

• 24/7 trading — no market close; surveillance is continuous, not session-based.
• Multi-venue fragmentation — the same asset trades across many venues; cross-venue context matters for detecting manipulation.
• On-chain transparency — wallet-level flows are public, which both enables and complicates surveillance (linking on-chain activity to venue accounts).
• Thinner liquidity — manipulation patterns (ramping, wash trading) can move price with less capital than in deep equity markets.

A surveillance system ported one-to-one from equities will miss crypto-native abuse patterns. The Title VI obligation is satisfied by detection that is designed for these conditions, not by a generic alerting tool.

Building the Article 92 programme in practice

The following components represent the operational shape of an Article 92-compliant market-abuse detection programme. This is illustrative, not a regulatory specification — ESMA's guidelines and the competent authority's supervisory expectations govern:

Surveillance architecture: The core is a real-time or near-real-time feed of orders and trades, monitored against alert models tuned to crypto-specific manipulation patterns. Unlike an equities surveillance system, the alert library must include patterns native to crypto — coordinated buy/sell cycles across wallets held by the same entity, artificial NFT floor-price pumping, and cross-venue arbitrage used to create misleading price signals.

Insider-list management: Any person with access to potentially inside information (token launch timing, major partnership announcements, governance votes with price-moving consequences) should be on a documented insider list with corresponding trading restrictions. This mirrors the securities-law practice; the crypto equivalent is operational rather than formal in most firms today, but Title VI makes it an expectation.

Suspicious transaction and order reporting (STOR): When surveillance generates an alert that, after review, cannot be excluded as abusive, the CASP must report it to the competent authority (in France, the AMF). The STOR obligation requires a documented review-and-escalation procedure so that alerts do not die in a queue.

Governance and training: The programme is only as good as its staffing. Staff responsible for surveillance review need to understand manipulation patterns, be empowered to escalate, and be trained to distinguish suspicious activity from normal market behaviour. A technical alerting system with no trained reviewer is not a compliant programme.

The DeFi boundary

A recurring question: does Title VI apply to DeFi? It applies to crypto-assets admitted to trading and to persons professionally arranging or executing transactions. Fully decentralized activity with no intermediary sits in MiCA's contested "fully decentralised" grey zone, where the scope is unsettled and authorities are expected to interpret it through 2026 (see MiCA DeFi grey zones).

The defensible reading: where there is a professional intermediary or a CASP venue in the chain, Title VI obligations attach. "It runs on a smart contract" does not by itself remove a professional arranger/executor from scope.

What a CASP should actually do

1. Map your role: do you professionally arrange or execute crypto transactions? If yes, Article 92 binds you.
2. Build crypto-native surveillance: continuous, cross-venue, on-chain-aware — not a ported equities tool.
3. Define inside information handling: who has access, disclosure controls, insider lists where relevant.
4. Stand up suspicious order/transaction reporting to the competent authority.
5. Align to ESMA guidelines under Article 92 for prevention and detection.
6. Document the programme — supervisory expectation is a demonstrable system, not ad hoc review.

Where vendors fit

• Sumsub — identity layer underpinning insider-list and account-to-wallet linkage.
• Cryptio — normalized transaction data that surveillance and investigation depend on.
• TaxBit — adjacent reporting (tax/DAC8) rather than market-abuse surveillance specifically.

Dedicated market-surveillance vendors exist beyond this stack; the point is that surveillance quality is bounded by data completeness across venues and chains.

Where Wag3s fits

Wag3s is not a market-surveillance product and does not detect insider dealing or manipulation — that is the job of a dedicated surveillance system and the trained reviewers behind it. What Wag3s Ledger supplies is the layer underneath: normalized, lineage-retained transaction data across chains and venues (see multi-chain reconciliation) of the kind credible surveillance and post-event investigation depend on. It supports a Title VI programme run by qualified compliance staff, rather than standing in for one. See the Ledger product page.

Further reading

• MiCA Regulation: What It Means for Crypto Businesses
• MiCA Implementation Checklist
• MiCA Crypto-Asset Whitepaper Requirements
• MiCA DeFi Grey Zones
• MiCA Timeline 2024-2026
• PSAN to CASP Migration (France)
• AML & KYC for Crypto Businesses

Sources

• Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 (MiCA), Title VI (Articles 86-92) — EUR-Lex official text: the insider-dealing, unlawful-disclosure and manipulation prohibitions and the Article 92 detection/reporting obligation.
• ESMA — Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA): the EU implementation hub.
• ESMA — supervisory guidelines to prevent and detect market abuse under MiCA: the Article 92 guidelines for competent authorities (July 2025).