Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) is the first attempt at creating comprehensive regulation for digital assets in the EU.
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Lawmakers in the European Parliament have approved the world’s first comprehensive package of rules aimed at regulating the cryptocurrency industry.
In a vote Thursday, the EU Parliament voted 517 in favor and 38 against to pass the Markets in Crypto Act, or MiCA. The legislation, which seeks to reduce risks for consumers buying crypto assets, will mean providers can become liable if they lose investors’ crypto-assets.
The rules will impose a number of requirements on crypto platforms, token issuers and traders around transparency, disclosure, authorization, and supervision of transactions, the EU Parliament said in a statement Thursday.
Platforms will be required to inform consumers about the risks associated with their operations, while sales of new tokens will also come under regulation.
Stablecoins like tether and Circle’s USDC will be required to maintain ample reserves to meet redemption requests in the event of mass withdrawals. Stablecoins that become too large also face being limited to 200 million euros ($220 million) in transactions per day.
The European Securities and Markets Authority, or ESMA, will be given powers to step in and ban or restrict crypto platforms if they are seen to not properly protect investors, or threaten market integrity or financial stability.
MiCA also addresses environmental concerns surrounding crypto, with firms forced to disclose their energy consumption as well as the impact of digital assets on the environment.
Mairead McGuinness, European commissioner for financial services, lauded the law’s approval Thursday and said she expects the rules to start applying “from next year.”
Andrew Whitworth, EMEA policy director for blockchain firm Ripple, said the parliamentary blessing marked “an important milestone for the crypto industry around the world.”
“Consistency in implementation around the EU will be key in providing crypto companies with the operational clarity to fuel innovation across Europe and guard against unwitting fragmentation of the Single Market,” Whitworth told CNBC via email.
“As part of this, there is a need to ensure that the legislation is applied proportionally with regards to how different companies’ crypto offerings are treated, based on the risk profiles of their activities.”
A step ahead of the U.S.
Parliament also cleared a separate law which aims to reduce the anonymity involved in transfers of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and stablecoins, voting 529 to 29 to pass the Transfer of Funds regulation.
This applies the so-called “travel rule,” which requires financial companies to screen, record and communicate information on both sender and recipient, to crypto transactions to help combat money laundering.
Transfers between exchanges and so-called “self-hosted wallets” owned by individuals will need to be reported if the amount tops the 1,000-euro threshold, a contentious issue for crypto enthusiasts who often trade digital currencies for privacy reasons.
In a tweet, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, said his company was “ready to make adjustments to our business over the next 12-18 months to be in a position of full compliance.”
Binance is under intense scrutiny from regulators over how it operates. In March, the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission sued Binance, Zhao and Binance’s former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, alleging the company actively solicited U.S. users without permission.
Zhao hailed MiCA as a “pragmatic solution to the challenges we collectively face.”
Regulators have sought to rein in the crypto market in the wake of numerous catastrophic industry failures. In May, terraUSD, a controversial stablecoin project, unraveled in a $60 billion flameout after investors lost confidence in its technical underpinning.
The demise of terraUSD caused a chain reaction in the industry, with various other firms, including Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi and Voyager Digital going bust as well. FTX, formerly the fourth-largest crypto exchange, filed for bankruptcy in November in the most high-profile crypto industry failure to date.
The move puts the EU a step ahead of the U.S. and U.K., which are yet to bring in formal rules for the crypto space. A U.K. official on Monday said specific crypto regulation could come into force within a year or so.
Once the EU laws come into effect, crypto companies will be able to use their licenses in one European country to “passport” their services across various member states. Crypto companies have been scrambling to obtain licenses from various European authorities and open new offices in anticipation of the law coming into effect.
U.S. crypto companies have been looking abroad for expansion in response to tough regulatory moves in their home turf. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued Coinbase with a Wells notice, which is often one of the final steps before the regulator formally issues charges, last month.
On Thursday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC at a fintech event the company is prepared for a “years-long” legal battle with the SEC.
He said separately in a talk on stage that the U.S. “has the potential to be an important market in crypto” but right now is not delivering regulatory clarity. If this goes on, he said, then Coinbase would consider options of investing more abroad, including relocating from the U.S. to elsewhere.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
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Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.