As of today, Bitcoin is exempt from consumption tax in Japan, and even Bitcoin skeptic Mark Cuban is now participating in an ICO. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 26:
- Bitcoin users in Japan no longer have to pay the 8% consumption tax on Bitcoin transactions as of today, July 1. Under the “Cabinet Order for Partial Revision of the Order for Enforcement of the Consumption Tax Act,” digital currencies are exempt from consumption tax. The revised law abolished consumption tax on digital currencies, but other taxes such as personal income tax, capital gains tax or corporate income tax still remain, according to Bitcoin.com.
- Bitcoin skeptic Mark Cuban is looking to take part in one of the hottest trends in the digital currency world right now: the initial coin offering. One of the companies Cuban is invested in, Unikrn, is planning its own offering, and digital currency news site CoinDesk said Thursday that the billionaire entrepreneur intends to participate. Cuban tweeted earlier this month that he thought Bitcoin was in a “bubble” yet he acknowledged then that there is value in the blockchain technology behind the digital currency.
- The state of Delaware has passed amendments to state law that make explicit the right to trade stocks on a blockchain, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Crammed in at the last minute before the state House went into recess, the measures were part of a broader series of amendments that legally recognized any number of records being stored on a blockchain. One source indicated that the bill passed with near unanimity, with a single vote against. The vote is widely considered to be the final obstacle to state adoption, following the passage of the bill in the Senate earlier this month.
- Japan is reportedly looking to integrate blockchain into its online systems for accepting government contract bids. According to Nikkei Asian Review, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, who oversees the Japanese administrative system and manages local governments, will test a blockchain-based system for processing government tenders in the fiscal year starting from this April through March 2018. In the tendering process, governments solicit bids for contracts from vendors, collecting a swath of information from those companies as they assess whom they’ll award projects. Japanese officials want to see if blockchain can help improve the efficiency of existing processes by using the tech to connect the government offices that possess the required information.
- Compared to the previous week the price of Bitcoin has decreased by almost nine percent, with the exchange rate currently at about $2455 per BTC. The price of Ethereum decreased by almost 20 percent over the same period, taking Ether down to a rate of $271 per ETH. Ethereum Classic lost about 15 percent, with the price decreasing to $17.73 per ETC. Zcash lost roughly 24 percent. One ZEC is now trading at roughly $285 per coin.
