Within six months, Ukraine will see new variants of the Law on Virtual Assets and a bill on taxation of crypto-asset operations. This was stated by a member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and chairman of the MFO Blockchain4Ukraine, Alexey Zhmerenetsky, at the Binance Super Meetup in Lviv.
The deputy said that the current regulatory acts, presented by the НКЦБФР and by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, diverge markedly. In particular, he noted different tax rates and the different scope of implementing the MiCA.
“Ukraine is not yet a member of the EU, and the regulation envisaged in MiCA is more complex. In the current conditions, when Ukraine does not have a large crypto market and capital there, implementing stringent requirements would make our country less competitive,” explained Zhmerenetsky.
To this end, the working group plans to prepare a kind of averaged variant of legislative regulation to reach a compromise between the proposals of the НКЦБФР and the Ministry of Digital Transformation. It will also take into account the wishes of the FATF and the European Commission.
“With an optimistic scenario, the text will be ready by the end of spring, and then in about a month and a half all this can be adopted,” added Zhmerenetsky.
Earlier, the Ministry of Digital Transformation described the MiCA norms as “overly burdensome” for the Bitcoin market in Ukraine, and allowed their partial implementation at the first stage.
As noted, the approved in 2021 Law on Virtual Assets was postponed until the taxation of operations with digital assets is enacted. In addition, the text of the act has been updated to reflect the provisions of the European regulation MiCA. The new version was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada on 7 November.
Together with it, the НКЦБФР presented a tax bill, proposing a rate of 18%, which drew condemnation from civil society.
In turn, the Ministry of Digital Transformation presented a draft of an alternative law, which envisages a gradual rise in the rate for individuals and a VAT exemption for legal entities, except for operations with tokenised assets.