Australia has decided to continue trying CRYPTOCURRENCIES as assets.

According to the Australian government’s budget announcement on Tuesday, legislation will be enacted regarding the treatment of digital currencies such as bitcoin as virtual assets.

The government has taken the step of allowing taxation of digital assets. It means that investors would pay capital gains taxes on profits from the sale of crypto assets through exchanges and when trading digital assets.

The new law does not apply to central bank digital currency (CBDC) or government-issued digital currency. Instead, they would be considered foreign currency.

Australia’s crypto sector is largely unregulated, but the Treasury Department announced in August that the government would take the lead in prioritizing ‘token mapping’, which will help identify how crypto assets and related services should be regulated.

The country is also working on the introduction of CBDC.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) published a White Paper in September to provide additional information on its proposed Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), dubbed eAUD.

In its concerted efforts to explore all possible use case scenarios related to the creation of eAUD, the RBA has partnered with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center (DFCRC) to co-develop systems to test the capabilities of the new currency. legal tender. The duo set about testing, and according to the recently released Whitepaper, pilot testing is scheduled to begin next year.

Heralded as one of the most advanced economies exploring the launch of a CBDC, Australia, through the RBA, will seek to understand how the system will work in all settings that have key stakeholders in the country’s financial ecosystem.

“The key objectives of the project are to identify and understand innovative business models, use cases, benefits, risks and operating models for a CBDC in Australia,” the Whitepaper reads.

During the same month, Australian Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg released a new draft of the Digital Assets (Market Regulation) Bill 2022, which aims to regulate digital asset exchanges.

The Act aims to provide an effective regulatory framework for the Australian market and establishes requirements for the introduction of digital asset exchanges, digital asset custody services, licenses for stablecoin issuers, and disclosure requirements for Yuan service providers. digital of the central bank of China.

In a statement on September 19, Bragg said that “Australia must keep pace with the global digital asset regulation race” as “Parliament must push for legal reform.”

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