Lithuania becomes the latest jurisdiction to release guidance in relation to ICOs. On 8 June 2018, the Lithuanian Government released new Guidelines to deal with what it referred to as an “explosion of ICOs” in the country. Lithuania heralds itself as a leader in FinTech and has published the ICO Guidelines as a step towards more “certainty and transparency in the regulatory, taxation [and] accounting” requirements of ICOs, and also, importantly, to encourage the crypto…
In Ukraine, two draft laws which aim to set out the legal basis for blockchain/cryptocurrency businesses in Ukraine have been proposed. The first draft law first submitted in October 2017 is concerned with taxation and provides for decreased corporate income tax, which is to be applied to margin earned on cryptocurrency deals (rather than turnover) and provides rules for the application of VAT. The latest draft law (reported here) seeks to define distributed ledger and smart contract…
Among the many areas of law that will have to continue to evolve around cryptocurrencies is the tax law. In the United States, as far back as 2014, the Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2014-21 which clearly stated that virtual currency is treated as property for U.S. federal tax purposes. That meant, among other things that: Wages paid to employees using virtual currency are taxable to the employee, must be reported by an employer on…