ROMANIA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Alexandru Stanescu, Simina Negulescu, Stefan Gheorghe and Ioana Vișan, Lexters
The right path depends on commercial objectives: • a gambling licence provides legal certainty, but comes with significant compliance burden, includ- ing fit-and-proper requirements, reporting obliga- tions and advertising restrictions. • structuring as a financial instrument works where the underlying events are financial or macroeco- nomic in nature, though it brings the product within MiFID II conduct, disclosure and capital require- ments; and • operating outside both frameworks is possible where the legal architecture is built in from the start – but the classification analysis, marketing controls and structural safeguards cannot be retrofitted after launch. Whatever the route, the analysis starts with the same questions: what does the product actually do, and how is it presented to users. Crypto Disputes in Romania: Asset Recovery, Exchange Hacks and Family Law Disputes around digital assets are reaching Romanian courts in significant volume for the first time. Three categories now dominate practitioner workload. • First, recovery of stolen, hacked or misappropri- ated crypto: victims of exchange hacks, phishing attacks, rug pulls and unauthorised wallet drains increasingly seek civil remedies in Romanian courts, using on-chain forensics to trace funds across mixers, bridges and exchanges. Worldwide freezing orders against unknown wallet holders (the so-called persons unknown route developed in the English courts) are starting to influence Romanian procedural practice, and CASPs operating under MiCA are routinely served with disclosure requests and seizure orders. In the recovery matters the firm handles, the decisive 72 hours after the incident drive the outcome: chain-trace the funds to the first off-ramp, identify the exchange, and co-ordinate an urgent disclosure request before the assets are layered further – the legal toolkit only works at the speed of the on-chain movement. The combination of Travel Rule data, exchange KYC files and chain analysis is making attribution easier than it was two years ago.
• Second, recovery of funds from insolvent or non-cooperating platforms: with several offshore exchanges entering liquidation since 2023, Roma- nian users are filing claims in foreign insolvency proceedings, pursuing parallel civil actions against directors, and asserting proprietary rather than contractual claims to segregated client assets. The classification of customer crypto as held on trust versus on the platform’s balance sheet is decisive and is being litigated on a case-by-case basis. • Third, family law and succession: crypto hold- ings now feature routinely in divorce proceedings and estates. Practical issues include identifying undisclosed wallets, valuing volatile assets at the relevant date, dividing self-custodied holdings without compromising seed phrases, and enforc- ing partition orders against tokens held on foreign exchanges. Courts are accepting blockchain explorers and forensic reports as evidence, but the procedural toolkit is still catching up with the technology. eIDAS 2.0 and the EU Digital Identity Wallet: KYC and Compliance Implications for Romanian Crypto Businesses The revised eIDAS framework introduces a standard- ised EU-wide identity verification layer. Users store verified identity data and attribute attestations (driving licences, diplomas, professional qualifications, corpo- rate data) in a state-provided digital wallet and present them selectively to registered businesses across the EU. Each EU member state, including Romania, must provide at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet within 24 months of the Commission’s implementing acts, free of charge for individuals. Alongside the wallet, a qualified electronic ledger framework carries a legal presumption of integrity and chronological ordering – a formal EU trust infrastructure for on-chain registries, RWA tokenisation and smart-contract evidence. The businesses most immediately affected in the digi- tal and blockchain space include the following. • CASPs and crypto-asset platforms: wallet- based KYC replaces manual document upload at onboarding, removing the GDPR exposure of hold- ing passport copies and proof-of-address files.
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