Taxation of digital assets

Lawyers start to develop the system of taxation of digital assets. The preparation of this system is going to be realized before the adoption of a special law in order to avoid problems in practice when applying the General rules of taxation on the matter of virtual assets.

The meeting of the Commission on legal support of the digital economy was held at the end of July, and the following topics were raised by the experts at this event:

• Opportunity of using a cryptocurrency as a monetary unit (for accounting purposes);
• Equating of all the token types – including issued in open blockchains – to the property rights, since under the Russian law, the tokens are related to the digital rights;

In addition, the committee has approved the proposals to exempt transactions with digital rights from VAT as well as to exclude imposition of personal income tax on citizens who dispose digital assets after one year of continuous possession.

The same preferences are proposed to be extended to miners. Particularly, through application of the patent taxation system in relation to mining individual entrepreneurs, as well as disclosure of details of the cryptocurrency wallets of such entrepreneurs to tax authorities (for the purpose of income control).