The bill on the taxation of transactions with digital assets submitted to the State Duma will not affect cryptocurrency holders. Andrey Tugarin, managing partner of GMT Legal, told ForkLog about this.

According to him, the document only covers the market for digital financial assets (DFA, security tokens) and utility digital rights (utility tokens), but does not mention digital currencies (like cryptocurrencies).

The lawyer noted that legislators envision a mechanism to tax the CFA by analogy with the securities market.

“Given the legal nature and economic meaning of DFA (actually these are blockchain securities), such an approach seems reasonable,” Tugarin said.

The similarity with the taxation of the securities market is confirmed, among other things, by the appearance of other entities that pay income to the taxpayer on CFA-related transactions, as well as the obligations of a tax agent to issuers and stockbrokers.

“This is very similar to assigning the duties of a tax agent to intermediaries in transactions with securities in the stock market,” the lawyer said.

The draft law provides for hedging with the help of CFA and a special taxation procedure for such transactions. Andrey Tugarin believes that such an approach will have a positive impact on the development of the market when the first digital financial markets come out.

The taxation of transactions made with cryptocurrencies will be determined separately. The expert believes that this particular document should have the highest priority. According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, while the turnover of the CFA in the Russian Federation is still zero, “the amount of funds in Russian crypto wallets exceeds tens of trillions of rubles.”

Earlier, ForkLog reported that the Ministry of Finance has changed the terminology of the bill “On Digital Currency”.