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India became one of the few countries to tax digital assets like cryptocurrencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) when finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a 30% tax on transfer of such assets in the Budget. Though the FM said taxing an asset does not bring legitimacy, industry watchers said that clarity on tax policy is likely to be the first step towards regulation of crypto. Some industry players said that the high tax will dissuade investors, while others felt it will give confidence to serious investors. The Budget announcements mean that income from any transfer of crypto, even gifts, would attract a 30% tax. In addition, investors cannot get any deductions and won’t be allowed to set off losses from transfer of such assets against any other income. The government has sent a strong signal against speculation or trading by retail investors, according to analysts.Attract or dissuade investors?According to industry players, clarity on taxation will give new customers confidence to enter the crypto market. Darshan Bathija, CEO & co-founder of crypto exchange Vauld, said that the government’s move has addressed concerns around legality and that he expects more Indians to invest in crypto. Presented ByDid you Know?Sunny Leone too

Nirmala Sitharaman, an electronic representation of India’s legal tender will give a big boost to its digital economy. How valid is that claim, and how risky is a hasty transition to a central bank digital currency, or CBDC? A digital rupee will be like banknotes, but minus the ATMs. Users will be able to transfer purchasing power from their deposit accounts into their smartphone wallets in the form of online tokens, which will be a direct liability of the Reserve Bank of India — just like cash.

Zerodha, says with tax deduction at source (TDS) at 1 per cent being implemented from July 1, crypto volumes in India will drop off the cliff. In a series of tweets, Kamath compared 1 per cent TDS on all crypto trades to tax collected at source (TCS) of 0.1 per cent on gold. «I assumed that the TDS is only on the gains,» he said. According to the provisions of this year’s finance bill, the buyer of a cryptocurrency has to deduct 1 per cent of the sale consideration and pay the amount as an advance tax to the government on behalf of the seller on every trade.

Tesla Inc said on Monday the fair market value of the electric-vehicle maker's bitcoin holdings as of Dec. 31 was $1.99 billion. In its annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla, which had invested $1.50 billion in bitcoin last year, said it registered about $101 million in impairment losses last year due to the value of bitcoin. A drop in the value of bitcoin resulted in the company recording losses, as the value of its holdings fell.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) has been the pearl of their eyes, thanks to its dirt cheap price and never-exhausting supplies. The dog-based memecoin has zoomed more than 32 per cent in the last 24 hours to $0.00002945 from $0.00002239. The rally has led its market-cap to hit the $15.5 billion mark, putting it back in the top 15 cryptos in terms of market-cap. The rally in Shiba Inu is widely supported by the volumes which rose more than 250 per cent in the last 24 hours. SHIB tokens worth more than $2.7 billion have exchanged hands during the period under review.

Crypto investing app CoinSwitch has launched recurring buy plan (RBP), a systematic way to buy crypto assets in India, as part of its mission to make money equal for all. The company aims to enable users to beat market volatility and avoid making impulsive buying or selling decisions. Users can now sign up through a waitlist to get early access to explore this new feature, the company said. CoinSwitch is India's largest crypto company, catering to primarily retail investors.

Accursed Share has announced a partnership with Merlin Sheldrake, a New York Times' best-selling author, to launch an NFT collection based on his award-winning book. The artist-based production studio will launch NFT collection for the book titled 'Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.' The NFTs are digitally curated from Sheldrake's studies of three-dimensional scans of thousands of sliced and rendered samples of plants and fungi exploring their codependent intimacy.

A Supreme Court bench observed last week that offence of money laundering is a more «serious and heinous crime than murder» as it hampers the entire economy. Even non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are now prone to money laundering. According to a report by Blockchain data platform Chainalysis, a small but growing portion of activity on NFT marketplaces could be attributed to money laundering.

New Delhi: India could widen the definition of virtual digital assets to cover any new such assets that may emerge and also further refine the provision to tax these assets. The budget for FY23 announced last week proposes to tax any income from the transfer of any virtual digital asset at a flat 30% rate. The provision will be applicable from April 1, 2022. The government could fine-tune the provisions proposed in the budget to tax virtual digital assets after discussions with the industry and to account for the dynamic nature of the sector, officials told ET.

cryptocurrency market was trading higher on Monday, with tokens associated with gaming witnessing a strong rise. That said, the recent rebound in prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum have turned investors cautious. Barring Terra, all other nine out of the top-10 digital tokens were trading with decent gains. Meme tokens like Dogecoin jumped more than 7 per cent while its peer Shiba Inu rallied 26 per cent. The global crypto market cap dropped almost 2 per cent to $1.94 trillion. However, the total crypto market volume dropped more than 9 per cent to $65.01 billion.

digital currency is likely to debut by early 2023, which will mirror any of the currently available private company-operated electronic wallets, but with a change that it will be a sovereign-backed facility, a top government source said. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech last week talked about launching a central bank-backed 'digital rupee' soon. A top government source, who wished not to be identified said, the digital currency issued by the RBI would be numbered in units, just like every fiat currency has an unique number. «The units issued in digital rupee would be included in the currency in circulation. It would not be very different from fiat currency. It would be more like an electronic form of fiat currency, so in a sense it would be a government-mandated electronic wallet,» the source said.

Bitcoin hit its highest in two weeks on Saturday, extending the previous session's strong gains as cryptocurrencies basked in a recovery in risk appetite and a rally in stock markets. The world's largest cryptocurrency hit $41,983, taking gains from Thursday's lows to nearly 16%, and marking a 27% rise from the year's low of $32,950.72 on January 24. Ether, the coin linked to the ethereum blockchain network, scaled the $3,000 level for the first time since January 21.

Bitcoin rallying 10 per cent to a two week high on Saturday. Ethereum, the second-largest crypto in m-cap terms, also jumped 9 per cent. Among key cryptos, Bitcoin was up 10 per cent in the last 24 hours at $41,615.37. Earlier, it hit a high of $41,983, taking gains from Thursday's lows to nearly 16 per cent and marking a 27 per cent rise from the year's low of $32,950.72 on January 24. Ethereum was quoting at $3,030.08, up 8.57 per cent.

Mumbai: The industry body representing cryptocurrency exchanges has decided to reach out to relevant policymakers to brief them about complications arising out of the government’s move to levy a 1% TDS on all crypto transactions. The issue was discussed at the meeting of the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC) on Saturday, where the overwhelming view was that this move would dent crypto trading volumes and drive small traders towards informal Person to Person (P2P) trading and decentralised exchanges (DEX).Crypto exchanges derive a large chunk of their revenues from traders who frequently trade and pay a small sum on every trade.

Bitcoin gained the most in four months as investors show signs of renewed risk appetite following a volatile week across financial markets. The largest cryptocurrency by market value jumped as much as 10% to $40,730, the most since Oct. 1. It hasn’t been above $40,000 in more than two weeks. Ether climbed as much as 12%. Even SOL, the native currency of the Solana blockchain that has tumbled in the wake of the Wormhole project hack, surged about 12%. The top cryptocurrencies began to rally in overnight trading after strong earnings from Amazon.com Inc. bolstered confidence in technology stocks, which digital tokens have largely tracked over the past months.

virtual assets at a flat rate of 30 per cent although lauded by global players has faced some scepticism regarding the approach. Sitharaman on Tuesday announced that the taxation will be applicable without any exemption or deduction and the loss arising from the sale of virtual assets cannot be set off against income. While this is a positive step towards the adoption of technology for the future, a flat 30 per cent tax without any loss offset is alarming to a lot of investors, said Aliasgar Merchant, Developer Relations Engineer of New York-based Tendermint.

crypto assets craze has been rising in India. Several investors, who are sceptical about direct crypto investments, are playing the theme via equities. Some of the top names from the sector include Nvidia, CME Group, Block, IBM, Mastercard, DocuSign, Amazon, Coinbase Holdings and GlobalX Blockchain ETF. The majority of these stocks are listed on Nasdaq. Once a frenzy, these spaces are now witnessing huge traction in 2022 after phenomenal returns in 2021, according to market experts.

Disappointing numbers from Meta, formerly known as Facebook and a sell-off in tech stocks such as Amazon and Snap added to the pressure. All the top-10 digital tokens were trading with decent gains. Terra gained more than 5 per cent and Bitcoin over 1 per cent. Dogecoin, however, fell marginally to slip to the eleventh spot.

cryptocurrency arm of Jump Trading said on Thursday it had restored more than $320 million to crypto platform Wormhole after the decentralized finance site was hit with one of the largest crypto heists on record. In a tweet, Jump Crypto said they chose to replace the stolen money «to make community members whole and support Wormhole now as it continues to develop.» Chicago-based Jump Trading acquired Certus One, the developer behind Wormhole, in August.

Mumbai: The worldwide crypto community has lauded India’s announcement to tax cryptocurrencies and develop a blockchain-based, regulator-backed digital currency as a significant step forward toward legitimising the asset class and encouraging innovation in blockchain technology. «This means that India recognises the importance of crypto, digital assets and their underlying technology, blockchain, too,» said Anndy Lian, Chairman of the Singapore-based BigONE exchange. «The next crypto bull market could be led by India.» On February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the government would impose a blanket tax rate of 30% on the transfer of «virtual digital assets.»

Clear (formerly Cleartax), which is backed by US-based payments major Stripe, is launching a crypto tax and portfolio management service for enterprises and retail users in India, amid confusion around crypto taxation in certain scenarios among investors and crypto exchanges. Following the budget's proposal on crypto taxation, including 30% tax on crypto gains and a 1% tax deduction at source, questions remain around tax implication of futures and derivatives trade, loss setoff, transactions on crypto aggregators and the definition of transfer of asset class (will it include peer-to-peer, airdrop, etc.), according to experts ET spoke to. “So, from a trading perspective, there's a lot of clarity awaited. Right now, even crypto gain to a crypto loss appears to be a pure tax event and there is no setoff against loss. With the strictest interpretation for active traders, the tax bill itself can be bigger than the portfolio, so we are trying to understand more from the policymakers,” Clear founder Archit Gupta told ET. “This could dramatically affect trading volumes on exchanges.”