Bitcoin Daily: S. Korea Eyes Crypto Capital Gains Tax; Crypto Lawyers See Rise In Demand

South Korean crypto users might soon see 20 percent taxes on their currency, according to Cointelgraph.

Lawmakers’ discussions established that the virtual assets can be construed as electronic certificates of economic value. Proposed amendments to existing bills want to classify cryptocurrencies as goods rather than currencies.

A South Korean court referenced the coins saying they “have been recognized only as a function of currency and have not been subject to income tax, but recently, virtual assets (like Bitcoin) are increasingly being traded as goods with property value. Considering various conditions, such as the recognition of intangible assets with property value, the necessity of taxation and the recognition of the property value of virtual assets are being raised at the same time.”

But Sung Tae-yoon, an economist with Yonsei University, warned that taxing cryptocurrencies could slow the country’s tech markets.

In other news, as the cryptocurrency industry gains mainstream traction, lawyers specializing in crypto are highly demanded by firms these days, Cointelgraph reported.

Coinbase recently tapped Paul Grewal, former Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel, to head up its legal team. That isn’t likely to be a lone incident; as the industry gains more recognition, companies will need more legal representation, experts told Cointelgraph. Crypto exchange Kraken, for example, plans to double its legal team’s size by 2021.

Meanwhile, the third co-founder of scandal-ridden Centra Tech, Sohrab “Sam” Sharma, has changed his plea in the company’s case to guilty of defrauding investors, Bloomberg reported.

Sharma now joins the other two co-founders, Robert Farkas and Raymond Trapani, in admitting that they duped investors into funding the Centra Card, which was purported to allow users to purchase items with digital currencies anywhere that accepted Visa and Mastercard. They falsely claimed to have a Harvard-educated CEO backing them.

Celebrities including Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled backed the project on social media. But both men later settled charges that they had failed to disclose what they had been paid for backing it.

And, the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) charged California’s Abra for failing to register before offering and selling securities-based swaps. The company did not transact those swaps on a national registry, according to a press release.

Abra, which works by letting users bet on price movements of listed U.S. equity securities, let those users enter into contracts to price those movements with blockchain-based financial transactions.

Abra marketed its app to retail investors but reportedly did not ensure that they were eligible to participate in that kind of transaction, the release states.

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