TechScape: the taxman is starting to take notice of the NFT gold rush
When world war three comes, the nuclear bombs drop out of the sky and humanity is wiped from the Earth, two things will remain: cockroaches and NFTs.
NFTs have become one of those unavoidable things that you really, really, shouldn’t have to think about, yet here we are. I’m writing about them, and you, inexplicably, are reading it.
Most people still don’t really understand what non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are, to go by the constantly upward trajectory of Google search trends, and even those that do sometimes struggle to come up with meaningful use cases for them. NFTs are unique digital items stored on the Ethereum blockchain. They’re most commonly associated with and connected to pieces of individual “artwork” (your mileage may vary, depending on how strongly you wrap inverted commas around that word), which are exchanged for eye-wateringly large sums of money.
It’s that last bit that makes them so interesting. Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon and Gwyneth Paltrow all own NFTs, which they bought using a middleman company called MoonPay, and have begun talking about them on national TV. (If you want to know what the people who previously owned those specific NFTs thought of their new owners, then I have a story for you).
Generally, if the penpushers at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) begin sniffing around something, you can assume that it is hurtling into the mainstream. And those eye-wateringly large sums of money have also made NFTs interesting to the taxman. We learned this week that HMRC has made its first NFT seizures as part of an investigation into a suspected attempt to defraud the taxman of more than £1m.
“Our first seizure of a Non-Fungible Token serves as a warning to anyone who thinks they can use cryptoassets
Read more on theguardian.com
