on the crypto
The news that comes from San Marino it seems destined to make a lot of supporters and opponents of digital assets discuss. The small republic, one of the oldest in the world, has indeed announced the intention of propose itself as a global hub for Blockchain technology. The task will be to take the country towards an ever greater commitment in this regard San Marino Innovation, a state-owned company which was given the job of to draft a bill capable of regulating the sector.
To implement it in the best way and to give it the necessary organicity, some of the best known world specialists in the sector have been called. The first of them will be José Maria Macedo, responsible for consulting at the Blockchain consulting company AmaZix, who will join the scientific committee as a tokeconomy expert. AmaZix can count on its participation in more than 120 blockchain projects and the suite of services it offers has enabled companies that have supported it to raise funds in excess of 1,3 billion.
What will San Martino Innovation do?
The task that was entrusted to San Marino Innovation was explained by its president, Sergio Mottola, which stated that it wants to contribute to increasing the ecosystem blockchain until turning San Marino into a real innovation hub. To do this, a first step is a support in the form of laws and government regulations in favor of companies that intend to invest in the sector, giving them certainty from a legislative point of view and thus becoming a real point of reference for innovative startups. An extremely ambitious challenge, as recognized by Macedo, who had no qualms about affirming the country's intention to stand up as main global hub in the Blockchain area.
The February decree
The new move by the San Marino government is in practice the logical evolution of the Blockchain decree approved in February, which affirmed the desire to guarantee greater transparency, clarity and simplicity to the provisions concerning the applications of Distributed Ledger Technology, in the framework of a revival of the economy. A relaunch entrusted to the innovation that characterizes the digital assets sector, as was explained by Mauro Zafferani, the Secretary of State, during a presentation he had had as a theater Milano.
On that occasion, the new legal provision, promoted by the State Secretariat for Industry of the Republic of San Marino and by San Marino Innovation itself was explained with the motivation to recognize the Blockchain technology through a clear and exhaustive definition. Zafferani then explained how the decree proposed to go to regulate the issue of the usage tokens, which will allow future access to products and services offered by a company, and investment tokens, digital instruments whose value is set by an underlying asset (shares, equity financial instruments and debt securities of the issuer), which can be traded on the reference market. While they were excluded from the first phase of their own processing cryptocurrency, which in turn must be governed by legislative additions.
The decree had also addressed the tax theme, providing for an exemption with regard to incomes that are made up of transactions carried out with tokens regulated to then resort to an assimilation mechanism, from a tax and accounting point of view, as a result of which usage tokens are considered to be foreign currencies, while those of investment are equivalent to shares, financial instruments or debt securities of the issuer, referring precisely to the underlying instrument.
San Marino in the footsteps of Malta
San Marino's moves have been compared by some analysts to a sort of challenge in Malta, another country that is trying to assert itself as a particularly receptive environment for all that is connected to digital assets. The intent seems indeed very clear: to push companies that do not find a favorable Blockchain ecosystem in their homeland to take tax residence in the country, thus giving the economy the opportunity not only to expand, but also to focus on innovation with extreme vigor. An invitation which could be collected above all from the Italian startups, which already in the past months had, moreover, addressed a heartfelt appeal to the Italian government to activate itself in order to lay the foundations for the best possible development of a sector that is in full swing in Italy evolution. In the absence of adequate answers, many of them could jump to the Titan Republic.
