Тheoretical and legal approaches and practical aspects pf determining virtual assets

Abstract

The nature of virtual assets and their legal regulation is a challenge for policymakers, because virtual assets themselves are a new phenomenon in the field of social and economic relations, which is significantly different from established types of property. The market of virtual assets, which has achieved significant development over the past 10 years, is of interest for research and from a fiscal point of view, because despite its significant volume, agreed approaches to the taxation of operations carried out in such a market are absent or are at the stage of development. A significant number of new challenges facing the legislator when determining the tax regime of operations with virtual assets arise from their qualities, which are categorically different from other types of assets. Virtual assets have a significant number of subspecies, which on the one hand are significantly different from each other, and on the other hand share common features. In particular, the most famous virtual assets - Bitcoin, Ethereum are completely decentralized, do not have a specific issuer, do not certify any civil rights of the owner, and do not have security. On the other hand, such types of virtual assets as electronic money tokens («stablecoins») or tokens related to assets are a form of expression of civil rights, namely the rights of claim against the issuer. Thus, it is problematic to determine which set of characteristics to use to distinguish virtual assets from other types of property while taking into account the full range of diversity of virtual assets themselves. In addition, transactions with virtual assets take place in forms different from transactions with cash, securities, etc. The ability of subjects to store, exchange, acquire and alienate virtual assets without the participation of any financial institutions or other intermediaries is another challenge in rulemaking, because it complicates the application of existing control methods in the field of taxation. A separate category of problems is also the phenomenon of decentralized finance («DeFi»), which eliminates intermediaries not only from the basic operations of moving virtual assets, but also from more complex economic operations, such as credit activities, loans, collateral, derivative contracts, etc. Considering the above, the relevance of the research lies in the emergence of qualitatively new categories of social relations, which, like any other social and economic relations, require legal regulation. Currently available regulatory instruments are not able to fully cover all the variety of operations with virtual assets, and to provide appropriate, special regulation of them.