Russian Duma passes bill to remove VAT, lower income tax rates on digital asset sales

Russia is turning to blockchain technology in an effort to counteract the economic isolation brought on by the sanctions imposed due to its invasion of Ukraine.

The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature, has passed a bill on the taxation of digital assets that exempts their sale from value-added tax (VAT) in the Russian Federation. Some other services of digital asset exchanges will also be exempted, according to state-run news service RIA Novosti.

In addition, the bill established income tax rates of 13% for Russian exchanges on the first 5 million rubles (currently about U$93,000) of the taxable base annually, 15% on amounts above that limit and 15% across the board for foreign exchange operators. The current tax rate for companies is 20%.

The taxation of digital assets under the bill is analogous to securities taxes, RIA Novosti reports. The government noted in the bill that a separate tax procedure for digital assets is key to the creation of an effective and competitive digital economy.

Russia has tempered its skeptical stance on cryptocurrency as the country has increasingly felt the pressure of Western economic sanctions stemming from its invasion of Ukraine. Major Russian banks have been blocked from the SWIFT system and G7 countries this week banned the purchase of newly mined or refined Russian gold. Those moves, along with a host of other sanctions, led to Russia’s reported default on foreign debt servicing Monday.

Russia's Sber bank is preparing to launch a stablecoin, and Russian Central Bank first deputy chair Olga Skorobogatova stated in an interview dated on Thursday that trials of a digital ruble will be moved up from 2024 to April 2023. A pilot project involving 12 Russian banks is underway.

“I think all self-respecting states will have a national digital currency within three years. […] We should be ready as soon as possible. Plus, this will settle the issue of being blocked from SWIFT, because this integration will make SWIFT unnecessary,” Skorobogatova said.

from https://ift.tt/70KkIEH
https://ift.tt/ipTFV9y

Comments

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges decentralized finance face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival. Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community. Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

National Futures Association adds rules for members handling digital assets

The CFTC-linked self-regulatory organization (SRO) has disclosure rules for members engaging in activities with BTC and ETH; now, standards of conduct are being added. The National Futures Association (NFA), the United States self-regulatory organization for derivatives markets, has issued a new compliance rule addressing members’ conduct. The new rule complements requirements issued in 2018. The NFA has “well over 100” members that engage in activities with digital asset commodities, but no way to address fraud or misconduct committed by those members, the organization explained to secretary of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Christopher Kirkpatrick in a Feb. 28 letter as it submitted the proposed new rule for approval. The new rule is modelled on the NFA’s antifraud rules for exchange traded futures and swaps transaction and retail foreign exchange. The NFA is the only registered self-regulatory organization that has delegated authority from the CFTC, giving it a...

Crypto Coin Search

Search This Blog