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Twenty-five votes. That is all that separated Poland from a crypto law it has now failed to pass for the better part of a year. On Sept. 4, the Sejm voted 241 to 198 with three abstentions to override President Karol Nawrocki's veto of the crypto bill, short of the 266 votes required. The legislation is dead for the third time. The country's MiCA alignment stays in limbo for a bit longer.
The crypto bill would have designated the KNF, Poland's Financial Supervision Authority, as the national regulator for crypto-asset service providers, with licensing, reporting and enforcement powers to match the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. MiCA already applies across the bloc, and the transition period ended July 1, but national authorities handle the licensing and supervision underneath it. Poland has now spent a year unable to decide who its supervisor will be.
How the crypto bill died, three times
The timeline is a study in legislative trench warfare. Nawrocki vetoed the first Crypto-Asset Market Act on Dec. 1, 2025, objecting to the regulator's power to block crypto websites and the compliance costs for local firms. An override attempt four days later got 243 votes to 192 and failed. Parliament passed another version; Nawrocki vetoed it again on Feb. 12, calling it nearly identical to the first. A second override failed on April 17, 243 to 191. The Sejm passed the government's bill again on May 15, against the backdrop of the Zondacrypto collapse investigation, and Nawrocki killed it on June 11, saying lawmakers had addressed exactly one of the 16 changes his office proposed. "Bad law does not become good law simply because it is passed a hundred times," he said at the time. His counter-proposal, which his office described as lighter on legitimate businesses and harder on fraud, went nowhere in Parliament.
The Sept. 4 session turned personal in a way only Polish politics can. Prime Minister Donald Tusk read witness testimony from the Zondacrypto investigation on the floor, alleging that former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro was promised the case would go away if he returned to power, with PLN 2 million, about €463,000, routed through a foundation run by his brother, PLN 500,000 of it allegedly for Ziobro's personal expenses. Tusk said the testimony named Ziobro's wife as the arrangement's central figure. These are investigation claims, not court findings, and Ziobro has not been convicted of anything. Tusk's aim was clear anyway: "You are disgracing yourselves," he told Law and Justice lawmakers, accusing them of shielding people tangled in questionable crypto dealings. Nawrocki denies any connection to Zondacrypto and says he never met its CEO.
What Poland's crypto limbo actually costs
Here is what you should not conclude: that Polish crypto is now unregulated. MiCA applies, authorized firms passport across the EU, and 244 crypto service provider licenses had been issued bloc-wide shortly before the July deadline, with Germany and France holding more than a third of them. Polish firms that want full legal clarity simply seek authorization elsewhere or operate under the EU framework directly, which is precisely the exodus Nawrocki claims his veto prevents. The unaddressed part is domestic enforcement: the KNF still lacks the licensing and criminal-penalty tools the bill would have given it, and the Zondacrypto probe that made those tools urgent is still open. The KNF's own supervision mandate covers crypto only at the edges while the veto standoff continues.
The wider read for the region: EU harmonization works until a member state's domestic politics breaks, and Poland has now broken on this bill for ten months straight. It also makes the US contrast sharper, where the SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets proposal is moving through its own process and even Binance's EU compliance posture is now a work in progress. The next move belongs to Tusk's government: a fourth bill that finally swallows the president's 16 amendments, or a constitutional standoff that leaves Polish crypto enforcement hollow right as the Zondacrypto case demands it most. Which one arrives first is the thing to watch.
