Belarus Unveils Cryptocurrency Regulation

Belarus issues an incredibly favorable directive for cryptocurrency activities attempted in its technology parks, thus providing legitimacy for the sector and turning it to be one of the world’s first nations to attain this purpose.

Completing the law begun by Decree No. 8 last December, Minsk has presently given tokens, smart contracts, mining, exchanges and all associated new activities an accurate legal standing.

In order to support the growth of the sector in the country, a complete tax exclusion will be given for all crypto dealings at least until 2023, thereby eliminating the problems for companies that trade and which would have to declare their profits.

The rules also comprises the appeal for a substantial degree of transparency, which requires ventures to clarify clearly who the managerial figures are and who are the recipients of the benefits concerned.

In addition, only extremely competent individuals in certain major technical positions are anticipated to be hired. The purpose of the KYC regulations and the safety of user data with a benchmark that complies with the GDPR necessities laid down for the European Union have also gotten substantial notice.

This programme is portion of the organization of the High Technology Parks (HTP), zones predominantly favored from the administrative and monetary point of view, built to support innovative economic activities to be created. Activities of immense influence in this region, such as the Viber messaging app, the World of Tanks video game, with 120 million players around the world and, among the most recent arrivals, MapDate, a mapping website with sizeable funding from the Japanese SoftBank, have been set up.

Commenting on Belarus initiatives, Martin Hess from consulting firm Wenger & Vieli, said:

“Belarus has drafted a stand-alone, comprehensive regulation for digital assets. Cryptocurrency regulation is the future, because only regulation provides legal certainty. The distributed consensus provided by algorithms is not sufficient. The Belarus approach has the benefit of speed and simplicity, because it does not require an understanding of the whole Belarusian legislation, court and legal practice in order to start a business. This puts its legislation at the level of other major players such as the USA, South Korea, the European Union, Japan, Switzerland and Singapore”.