Polish lawmakers failed for a third time to overturn President Karol Nawrocki’s veto of crypto market legislation, leaving the country without a designated supervisor for digital assets even as the collapse of exchange Zondacrypto widens into a criminal investigation.
The Sejm, Poland’s lower house, voted 241-198 on Friday in favor of overriding the veto, with three abstentions. The motion needed a three-fifths majority of 266 votes and fell 25 short. Nawrocki has now vetoed the legislation three times, arguing each time that the proposed rules would overregulate the industry and impose excessive costs on firms and supervisors alike.
No MiCA supervisor in place
The blocked bill would have set up Poland’s national framework for applying the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, known as MiCA, and placed market oversight under the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, the KNF. MiCA already applies across the EU, but enforcement depends on each member state designating a national authority.
The KNF said Friday that Poland still lacks that authority. In practice, crypto firms operating in the country face EU-level rules with no domestic body responsible for policing them. Licensing, market abuse investigations and consumer complaints all fall into a gap between Brussels and Warsaw.
“Poland still lacks a designated authority responsible for supervising the cryptoasset market,” the KNF said in its Friday statement.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government wants tighter oversight and has cited the expanding criminal investigation into Zondacrypto as reason to move quickly. The president’s office has shown no sign of accepting a revised bill.
The Zondacrypto collapse
Zondacrypto, formerly known as BitBay, was once one of Central Europe’s most prominent exchanges. Its Estonian operating entity, BB Trade Estonia, was declared bankrupt by an Estonian court in August. The first creditors’ meeting is scheduled for September 17.
Estimated losses from the collapse stand at no less than 350 million Polish zlotys, roughly $95 million. Because the bankruptcy proceedings run under Estonian law, Polish creditors must navigate a cross-border insolvency process to recover funds. Estonian courts handle the asset pool, while Polish prosecutors handle the criminal side, and the two tracks do not share a timetable.
Prosecutors are still working through the case, which includes the disappearance of a figure connected to the exchange, alleged payment schemes, and questions about whether political figures protected or enabled its operations. The September 17 creditors’ meeting is expected to clarify how much of the missing money can be recovered, if any.
Why the veto keeps holding
Nawrocki’s office has framed its objections in terms of cost and scope, not principle. The president has said he supports crypto regulation in general but considers the Polish drafts too expensive to administer and too broad in the supervisory powers they hand to the state. Each veto has returned the bill to the government without a negotiated middle ground.
The failed override leaves both sides stuck. The government cannot pass its framework without the president, and the president has not signaled willingness to sign a softened version. The KNF wants a supervisory mandate it does not have. Neither is getting it yet.
A cautionary signal for the region
The timing is awkward for the bill’s opponents too. A major exchange failed on their watch, and the argument that Poland’s market needs no supervisor is harder to make with a $95 million hole in creditors’ pockets. But the scandal cuts the other way as well: lawmakers wary of being tied to a permissive regime may prefer delay over rushing rules in the shadow of a high-profile collapse.
Poland is now the EU’s largest member state without a designated MiCA supervisor. Estonia, long one of Europe’s more liberal licensing jurisdictions, tightened its own regime in recent years, yet Zondacrypto’s Estonian arm still reached insolvency. The case gives ammunition to both camps in Warsaw: those who say supervision was missing, and those who say supervision does not prevent failure anyway.
The wider Central and Eastern European digital asset industry is watching. Exchanges licensed in one member state passport services across the EU under MiCA, so a supervisory gap in Poland affects firms and customers well beyond its borders. Regional operators now face the prospect of their home market regulating them through Estonian bankruptcy courts and Polish criminal prosecutors instead of a financial supervisor.
The Sejm is expected to try again, but with three vetoes already issued and the investigation still unfolding, no timetable exists for a revised bill. Poland’s crypto firms remain in a supervisory vacuum, operating under EU regulation that no domestic authority is empowered to enforce.
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