European Tax Man Wants Your Crypto Coins

Even though the European Parliament is still recovering from the ‘Brangelina of Brussels’ scandal (also known as Qatargate) and realizes that its popularity has dropped, it also hopes to levy new taxes from the various European member states.

One of them concerns crypto, as the Italian European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, Paolo Gentiloni, explained a few weeks ago. Known as the Mica (Markets in crypto assets regulation), the EU urges member states to tax all citizens who have crypto investments as such.

Don’t know where

The anonymity, the fact that there are more than 9,000 different cryptocurrencies available, and the digital nature of cryptos mean that many crypto investors who make big profits remain under the radar of the authorities.

Gentolini said.

That is why the EU now hopes that the legislation it has proposed will require member states to urge crypto trading platforms operating on their territory to pass on customer data to the local government. The Dutch tax authorities have probably already started with this, as the Financieel Dagblad reported yesterday.

However, it is not yet certain whether the new EU rules will be of much use, as crypto companies are increasingly located in tax havens or simply do not have a headquarters (as do many smaller tech applications).

Steffen Kern, risk director of EU regulator ESMA, admitted last week during a discussion in the European Parliament about FTX that:

We often don’t even know where crypto companies are physically located, they are in the cloud or something.