In early September, the Verkhovna Rada passed in the first reading the draft law No. 10225-d, which is supposed to regulate the taxation of virtual assets. Danylo Hetmantsev, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Finance, Taxation, and Customs Policy, called the document “a huge step towards legalizing crypto,” but stressed that the text would require 2-3 months of revisions to be prepared for the second reading.
“We received 300 pages of amendments from the National Bank and 50 pages of proposals from the Tax Service. This actually means that we will need to rewrite the draft law almost completely for the second reading,” the MP said.
According to Hetmantsev, the main goal of the draft law is to legalize the market, protect the rights of asset owners, and ensure income taxation.
At the same time, he insists:
“Crypto taxation should not be preferential.”
The current version of the law provides for a preferential personal income tax rate of 5% (5% of the military tax) for the transitional period, but, as the MP notes, even today, cryptocurrency transactions are taxed according to the general rules — 23% of income.
According to Hetmantsev, the unregulated market has already cost Ukraine billions in losses.
“Every year the state loses about UAH 15-16 billion. That is, in the three years since the adoption of the framework law, this is about fifty billion lost,” Hetmantsev explained.
It is worth reminding that according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI), Ukraine has lost at least $10 billion in recent years alone due to the lack of proper regulation, and the market itself remains vulnerable to abuse.
The Head of the Finance Committee also reiterated his position that cryptocurrencies will not be a means of payment in Ukraine, although some exceptions for specific transactions will be defined by law.
He added that the National Bank should become the regulator of this segment, as “the National Securities and Stock Market Commission has failed to cope with this task”.
The politician also noted that he does not rule out the possibility of a cryptocurrency issued in Ukraine, by Ukrainian businesses or Ukrainian investors, in the near future.
At the same time, Hetmantsev did not rule out that the final adoption of the document could be inherited by the next convocation of the Rada.
“We are very afraid, frankly, of ‘hitting the wall’ because we do not understand the market well enough. […] But it should be understood that it will not be possible to finally regulate the market in 2-3 weeks, as we used to do with the adoption of some other draft laws, for objective reasons,” he concluded.
