Turkish authorities will not impose a tax on crypto trading this year

Previously, the country introduced fines and jail terms for violating the rules of handling cryptocurrency

25.09.2024 - 09:15

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What’s new? Turkey will not consider taxing profits from trading stocks and cryptocurrencies this year. According to Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz, the issue was previously discussed but was eventually dropped from the agenda. Instead, officials will focus on cutting tax breaks in the short term.

Material by Bloomberg

What else is known? In Turkey, retail equity investments are a popular tool for hedging inflation, which earlier this year reached 75,5%. However, the authorities’ plans to tax such gains have put pressure on share prices. Following the negative public reaction, Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said that work in this area would be reviewed.

According to Bloomberg data, trading volume on the country’s main stock exchanges fell from $4 billion to $2,3 billion in August.

The authorities have now launched a three-year plan to bring inflation down to less than 10%. Investors are watching for additional government initiatives to cut spending, which rose last year due to the strongest earthquake in 80 years, as well as social benefits ahead of elections.

Earlier, Turkey’s Capital Markets Board (CMB) listed Bybit, one of the leading centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs), as a digital asset service provider.

Analysts at crypto market data aggregator CoinGecko said that Turkey ranked in the top 3 in terms of interest in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), behind only the United States and Indonesia. In RWA tokenization, digital tokens are issued on the blockchain to reflect the value of real-world assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and more.

Also, this month, the country’s authorities said that 47 crypto firms have already applied for licenses to operate in the local market, including exchanges Binance, OKX, and Bitfinex.

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