ROME - The Bank of Italy will publish guidelines in the coming days on how to apply upcoming European Union rules on crypto assets with a view to preserving the regular functioning of the payment system, Governor Fabio Panetta said on Tuesday.

In the text of a speech delivered to the Italian Banking Association (ABI), Panetta said the EU regulation, dubbed Market in Crypto Asset Regulation (MiCAR), considered that electronic money tokens (EMTs) and asset-reference tokens (ARTs) met requirements to be used as means of payment.

The value of EMTs is linked to that of a single official currency while that of ARTs depends on one or more underlying asset.

"Our assessment is that the only instruments that can serve as means of payment fully preserving the public's trust are EMTs, electronic money tokens, which can be issued by banks or electronic money institutions," Panetta said.

(Reporting by Valentina Za, editing by Gavin Jones)