Taxation of cryptoassets

The object of this report is the taxation of Cryptoassets operations. It starts from the premise that the importance of these operations is growing due to their advantages and not because of the possibility of tax evasion or criminal conduct, especially due to anonymity and lack of regulation.

Its purpose is to present the characteristics of Cryptoassets and discuss the main issues that impact the tax system, advocating, for their resolution, a coordinated and global regulation.

For that aim, it estabilishes as essential the use of a standard terminology, a clear conceptualization of Cryptoassets’s legal nature and a coordinated taxation based on the same fundamentals. It presents a technologically neutral definition of Cryptoassets that separates the infrastructure aspects from the functional aspects, and discusses the State’s capacity to regulate the activity and the best way to do it.

It defends that, due to the characteristics of the internet, regulation should focus on intermediary entities. It proposes that taxation should start from the recognition of the economic functions of Cryptoassets and occur based on this function.