The Brazilian city, famous for its celebrations, takes a ride on crypto roads; this time, the venture is to accept Bitcoin to cover tax payments. The country also intends to release NFTs.
Employing Bitcoin to pay taxes could soon become an absolute fact for the inhabitants of one of the most significant areas in Brazil and all of Latin America.
Rio de Janeiro is getting ready to receive digital assets to pay real estate taxes. Rio de Janeiro’s Secretary of Economic Development, Chicão Bulhões, and Secretary of Finance and Strategy, Pedro Paulo Carvalho Teixeira, revealed the new fiscal scheme.
According to the news revealed by media outlets, the proposal arrived on Friday during the opening of the Carioca Cryptoactivity event. They anticipated that the city inhabitants would be able to pay the IPTU (Imposto Sobre, property propriety, and urban land) with digital assets as of 2023, although, in the future, this measure could expand its policies to other taxes and even city services.
Cointelegraph highlighted Pedro Paulo’s words by saying that the city’s goal is to reinforce a robust market for the new asset class, adding that they wish to stimulate the circulation of digital assets by integrating them into the payment of taxes.
The Brazilian City that Moves Towards Digital Assets
Rio de Janeiro is about to be the first region in Brazil to receive digital assets for taxes. It would also be one of the first cities in Latin America to encourage a measure of this nature after El Salvador.
The municipality of Rio will join efforts with other entities focused on digital assets that will be in charge of turning these currencies into Brazilian reais.
This event assumes that the city will not directly hold the funds in digital assets. This information got highlighted by a note from the City Council that Bloomberg Online picked up.
Some reports suggest that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, could work closely with the municipality on this initiative. A day after the news, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed the inauguration of a new headquarters in the region. Zhao said in a tweet that the information is part of Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes’ pro-crypto effort.
The announcement adds to a broader strategy by the Brazilian city to enter the digital currency space. Earlier this year, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro also made public the creation of a task force to find new ways for the city to encourage the use of digital assets to improve the internal economy.
At that time, Paes also advanced plans to allocate a percentage of the Municipal Treasury’s reserves to cryptocurrencies and the idea that the city has its native token.
Rio de Janeiro, Now into NFTs
Among the new strategies to get into the crypto space, the City Council also revealed the creation of a Municipal Committee for Crypto Investments (CMCI). This group will be in charge of developing a new methodology for investing in crypto, following the guidelines of the Brazilian Securities Commission (CVM) and the Central Bank.
On the other hand, a public hearing will get held for the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFT) in Rio de Janeiro.
According to Bloomberg, among the proposals is that the City Council creates NFTs with images of tourist spots in the city and the possibility of opening spaces for artists from the region to make interventions that get then represented in the form of NFTs.
By: Jenson Nuñez
