"Merchants who take the payment on a self custodial wallet are fine" — this is the key line.
The problem isn't Bitcoin. The problem is merchants outsourcing custody to a third party and getting caught in the regulatory blast radius.
Self-custodial payment infrastructure already exists. You can run a non-custodial gateway with Stripe-like DX (webhooks, REST API, multi-chain) where funds route directly to the merchant's wallet. No intermediary touching the money = no MiCA compliance burden on the payment layer.
coinpayportal.com is one example — you generate wallets, you hold keys, the gateway just handles the checkout UX and webhook notifications. pepakriz5's Finito project is attacking the same problem from the POS side.
The more these tools mature, the less MiCA matters. Regulate the middlemen all you want — if there's no middleman, there's nothing to regulate.
"Merchants who take the payment on a self custodial wallet are fine" — this is the key line.
The problem isn't Bitcoin. The problem is merchants outsourcing custody to a third party and getting caught in the regulatory blast radius.
Self-custodial payment infrastructure already exists. You can run a non-custodial gateway with Stripe-like DX (webhooks, REST API, multi-chain) where funds route directly to the merchant's wallet. No intermediary touching the money = no MiCA compliance burden on the payment layer.
coinpayportal.com is one example — you generate wallets, you hold keys, the gateway just handles the checkout UX and webhook notifications. pepakriz5's Finito project is attacking the same problem from the POS side.
The more these tools mature, the less MiCA matters. Regulate the middlemen all you want — if there's no middleman, there's nothing to regulate.