The country said EU crypto rules will come into force in December 2025, ahead of the general deadline for implementing MiCA for all 27 member states of the EU.

The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation reported that the first comprehensive European Union crypto framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Act, will come into force on a national level in December 2025.

As follows from the release published by the Ministry on Oct. 26, the first vice president of Spain, Nadia Calviño, has met with the president of the European Securities and Market Authority, Verena Ross, to discuss the government’s intention to advance the implementation of MiCA.

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The general deadline for implementing MiCA for all 27 member states of the EU is July 2026. It includes the 36-month transitional period given to the member states since the date of the publication of the MiCA in the Official Journal of the European Union in June 2023. Spain wants to shorten that transition period to 18 months. According to the release:

“[This] will provide legal certainty and greater protection for Spanish investors in this type of assets.” 

Meanwhile, large international crypto exchanges in Spain have been granted local licenses. In September, Coinbase secured an Anti-Money Laundering compliance registration from Spain’s central bank, and Kraken attained a virtual asset service provider registration. Earlier, in June, the same regulatory approval was granted to Crypto.com.

This month, Banco de España, Spain’s central bank, publicly joined a chorus of European banking institutions preparing their customers for the potential benefits of a digital euro. The bank claimed that the physical cash format “does not allow to exploit all the advantages offered by the growing digitalization of the economy and society.”

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A judge mostly sided with Midjourney, DeviantArt and Stability AI’s bid to dismiss the artists’ class-action lawsuit that accused the firms of copyright infringement.

Artists have been dealt a setback in their copyright fight against generative artificial intelligence (AI) firms after a class-action lawsuit against several of the firms was dismissed by a United States judge, citing a lack of evidence.

In an Oct. 30 order, California District Court Judge William Orrick said the copyright infringement suit against generative AI image service Midjourney, art platform DeviantArt and AI firm Stability AI was “defective in numerous respects,” granting earlier dismissal bids from the firms.

Judge Orrick, however, allowed a copyright infringement claim from one class action member against Stability to go ahead and allowed the class 30 days to attempt to submit an amended suit with more proof.

“Even Stability recognizes that determination of the truth of these allegations — whether copying in violation of the Copyright Act occurred in the context of training Stable Diffusion or occurs when Stable Diffusion is run — cannot be resolved at this juncture,” Orrick wrote.

The lawsuit was first filed in mid-January and claimed Stability’s AI model, Stable Diffusion, scraped billions of copyrighted images without permission — including those of the artists — to train the software.

DeviantArt also incorporated Stable Diffusion on its site, possibly copying millions of images from there without a license and violating its own terms of service, the suit alleged.

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Orrick said the AI-generated images likely don’t infringe the artists’ copyright, as it’s “not plausible” they’re derived from copyrighted images. He added that he’s “not convinced” unless the class can show the generated images are similar to the artists’ work.

Copyright claims from some class members were dismissed, as their images weren’t registered with the Copyright Office, which is needed for bringing a copyright infringement suit.

Copyright infringement allegations are central to similar legal actions taken against AI firms, such as the Author’s Guild’s class action against OpenAI, Universal Music Group’s suit against Anthropic and Getty Images suits against Stability AI in the U.S. and United Kingdom.

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According to an internal memo reportedly circulating within X, the company is now valued at just $19 billion.

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), is worth less than half of what the tech billionaire bought it for in October last year, an internal memo has reportedly revealed.

According to an Oct. 30 report from Bloomberg, an internal memo and sources familiar with the matter said that restricted stock units recently paid to employees of the company were valued at $45 a share, which puts the company’s value at around $19 billion — less than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid for the company on Oct. 27, 2022.

Musk has made a series of controversial moves since taking over the platform, including rebranding it to X, changing many of its content rules and laying off approximately 80% of the company’s workforce.

Musk’s drastic changes, along with his outspoken presence on the platform, also appear to have made his company less popular with advertisers, with Bloomberg estimating that X has now lost at least half of its total advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, the significant drop in revenue has made the servicing of Musk’s debt worrisome for the firm as a whole. As of the time of publication, X reportedly owes around $1.2 billion in interest payments on its roughly $13 billion in total debt.

Musk has made it clear that he wants to rely more heavily on paid user subscriptions, but as of right now, less than 1% of the platform’s total user base has decided to fork over money for a premium subscription, which equates to less than $120 million in annual revenue.

Cointelegraph contacted X for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

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On the other hand, some have seen benefits from Musk’s tenure at the company.

One of the popular additions to the platform under Musk has been paying individual creators for their engagement by way of revenue-sharing payments.

Recently, Musk announced that any posts corrected by the Community Notes feature would become “ineligible for revenue share” — a move that seeks to prioritize accurate information over purely viral and potentially inaccurate content.

Making a slight change to creator monetization:

Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share.

The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2023

Meanwhile, Musk has repeated on numerous occasions that he means to turn X into an “everything app” — largely inspired by the super apps popular in Asia such as WeChat, which would see the social media platform expand to include a range of financial services, video calls and other lifestyle use cases.

There are also hopes that X will integrate cryptocurrency in some way in the future.

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