Paraguay wants to regulate crypto mining and trading, but its proposed laws are nothing like El Salvador

• A leaked version of Paraguay’s upcoming crypto bill may put a stop to speculations about its crypto friendliness.
• The bill seeks to give crypto mining the same status as other industrial activities.
• It also wants to have crypto firms register with the government, in order to track, trace and tax such transactions.

The hype around Paraguay becoming the second country to legalise Bitcoin has been building since El Salvador announced the cryptocurrency as legal tender last month. But, a
leaked draft of the crypto bill that Paraguayan congressman Carlos Rejala plans to introduce in the Chamber of Deputies — akin to India’s Lok Sabha — has no mention of making Bitcoin or any other
cryptocurrency legal in the country.

Instead, it focuses on regulatory purview — specifically when it comes to taxation. The draft, first reported by
Decrypt, requires all crypto companies to be registered with its Undersecretariat of State Taxation.

While the bill is written in Spanish, a rough translation of the document says that the country is establishing the law to “establish legal certainty, financial and fiscal in the businesses derived from the production and commercialization of virtual assets”.

The bill is meant to regulate both crypto mining and
crypto trading within Paraguay, and will require companies to register as “obligated subjects”.

The document suggests that unlike El Salvador, Paraguay has a lot of the same concerns that some other countries have had with crypto firms — that of taxation. The country seemingly wants to ensure that crypto firms are brought under its tax regime from the get go, and wants to have traceability for such transactions and investments.

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