Governments Move Into the 21st Century … Kinda!

Governments Move Into the 21st Century … Kinda!

Our world is changing, and where tokenization will provide the foundation of our economy. We must now see the signing of crytoasessets in the same way we see the signing for contracts with wet signatures. In fact, we need to get rid of wet signatures in this modern world, as they have little in the way of credibility. And so it is great to see that the HMRC in the UK are now acknowledging cryptoassets [here]:

Of course, the HRMC wants to gather tax on these assets as they are bought or transferred, but, at least, the signing of these assets now has some form of legal certainty. I don’t quite believe that some of the definitions are quite right, such as:

Cryptoassets (or ‘cryptocurrency’ as they are also known)

I believe that cryptocurrency is one type of cryptoasset, and that they are not the same thing. They do then define that they are

cryptographically secured digital representations of value or contractual rights that can be: transferred; stored; and traded electronically

I also disagree with this:

While all cryptoassets use some form of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) not all applications of DLT involve cryptoassets.

But then they say that there are three types of cryptoassets:

• exchange tokens
• utility tokens
• security tokens

But earlier they said that cryptoassets where cryptocurrency. An exchange and utility token are not cryptocurrency, and do not have to be defined on a ledger. They are basically signed using public key encryption.

Conclusions

I think they should have enabled a review on the document, but at least the UK government are starting to evolve policies on tokenization. Here’s a previous analysis: