18th April 2022 > > Portugal.

tl;dr

Portugal is a great place for all things crypto.

Market Snap (at time of writing)

Market Wrap

With a decisive break below $40k yesterday evening, the techies are of course out in force.

Much is being made of a historical coincidence that approximately 800 days after each halvening, BTC shows capitulation behaviour before heading upwards again. You will recall that the last halvening was on May 11th 2020, which is now 707 days ago. Putting any credence into the idea that historical behaviour can be used to predict short or medium term price movements is a stretch too far, but there are many people out there who do just that.

More interestingly for me is that the perpetual futures funding rate has had a huge overnight move, dramatically increasing the risk of a short squeeze.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Portugal

Germany’s openness towards the crypto industry has been frequently commented on in previous editions of the CCC. Now it is Portugal’s turn.

Whether by accident or design, Portugal has long had an extremely tax-friendly approach to crypto investors. In fact, the tax authorities would struggle to be more accommodating.

Income and capital gains made on traditional investments are taxed at 28%, much in line with most other EU countries. However, capital gains and income from crypto investments have been specifically excluded from the taxation regime since 2018 for individuals, though not businesses.

It remains to be seen how long this situation will endure, but it is not the last of Portugal’s efforts to attract inward crypto investment.

Banco de Portugal has responsibility for registering and regulating crypto asset service providers in Portugal. It has just granted a licence to Bison Bank to be the inaugural crypto bank operating a subsidiary called Bison Digital Assets.

Crucially, this entity will offer exchange and custodial services for high net worth and institutional investors though unfortunately they do not offer services to retail:

“Bison Digital is a virtual assets platform for individuals and institutions, fully owned by Bison Bank, that delivers a reliable and secure platform for this new asset class.

We provide financial and virtual assets custody and exchange services that benefit from the highest levels of security within a fully regulated and secured environment, pursuing ultimately for parity between the financial and virtual worlds.”

Initiatives like this prompted Decrypt to rank Lisbon as the 7th most influential city in the world for all things blockchain.